Somewhere over the Rainbow
by SDoradus
Summary: Arc 5 of 8: Exploring Cronos; renewal of the ties that bind; working through PTSD. An ME Fic written a year before the "Mass Effect: Andromeda" trailer, the last arc of "Gone with the Sun" has survivors heading for Andromeda.
1. Light in dark places

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 50 **Light in dark places**

* * *

 _Hanshan_

 _Peacemaker, Normandy,_ and _Nairobi_ hung at the synchronous zenith point for Port Hanshan, running silent and (in the frigates' case) stealthy while a reconnaissance in force unfolded thousands of kilometres below.

First to enter the dock portals was a drone. Two more frigates then hovered before the Port Hanshan docks, which amounted to a row of steel portals set in a mountainside. Local gravity of Noveria was around four fifths that of Earth, well within a frigate's surface hover envelope.

The doors had suffered the indignity of a two megaton whack centered four kilometres off. On the other hand it was comparatively clean fusion, the blast had stripped a vast quantity of ice and snow off the port surrounds, and the warhead had been directed downwind.

" _Radiation negligible. Phase one, Beachhead dock. Proceed."_

Shepard had said _"Whatever you do, do it fast, do it with backup, do it with an exit plan."_ _Pegasus_ came down like the wrath of god, Thanix primed, _Overlord_ covering five hundred metres behind. Lemaes' shuttle dropped her squad of four commandos plus herself, and Liara – two combat triads. The little troop ran down the dock and took cover. Nothing happened for thirty seconds as the _Pegasus_ shuttle returned to her open hold. The shuttle doors opened again and four engineers ran out – two asari, two human – carrying portable breaching packs.

" _Ingress powered down but standby telltales are up."_ One of the engineers pried open a maintenance panel and clipped cables to emergency supply points. Green access lights appeared on the doors, which the lead engineer opened. _"Layer-1 Accessed."_ Lights came on in the dockway. All but two then ran back behind Lemaes' covering squad. Another thirty seconds passed. _"Layer-2 up."_

After two minutes: " _Layer-3 unserviceable, proceed."_

" _Phase two, breach."_

A second shuttle appeared from _Overlord_ and dropped off Miranda's combat triad – herself, Jack, and Toombs. Over the next ten minutes nearly eighty of _Nairobi's_ Alliance marines, mostly Russian or Kazakh, filed out of the shuttles and prepared combat shields. (To minimize combat comm problems, large combat groups were usually all one mother tongue or nationality, except for the anomalous 'foreign legions' of France and Spain.)

The Russian marine captain snapped _"Phase three. Dock two."_

Immediately, the teams began entering the base, setting up combat floods as they worked to gain access to the neighbouring portal. This took three minutes.

The shuttles again withdrew but not to the frigates; they powered out of atmosphere and began loading more marines from _Nairobi_.

This would take thirty minutes. In that time, troops already in place would remain on the docks against emergencies, unless given permission to enter.

Permission from the NDC administrator would not happen quickly. Thermal exhaust blooms indicated the Port Hanshan reactors were still operational so at least their VIs were up, but no-one knew whether anyone alive was supervising.

" _Phase Four. Recon one and two."_

Both frigates entered the (now operational) docks. Their cores idled; they would be ready to leave at seconds' notice. More engineers sallied forth; work began on the security console in "Plaza access", while Liara's and Miranda's triads (personal security detachments) moved to Port Hanshan's Plaza access elevator.

It was powered down, but swift work by the engineers brought the attomechanical interfaces up. No electro-optical interfaces were up, so omni-tools were useless, but the breaching packs had the (somewhat bulky) special equipment to interface with a Layer-2 net. In three minutes both the lift shaft and the adjacent stairwells were up and lit.

" _Operation Floodlight, begin."_

Liara and Miranda entered the elevators sixty seconds after more of Lemaes' commandos and Toombs' mercenaries began clearing the stairwells. They nonetheless arrived at the plaza level a few seconds in front, and softly took cover near Opold's store, dropping duffels of equipment.

The surroundings were a stygian black. Not even night visor overlays could penetrate without a few photons. Just a few green LEDs dotted the opposite and bottom of the plaza. On the arrival of the commandos, lights were set up for ten metres along Opold's shop front, but not switched on. Liara brought out two flare pistols.

" _Actinic shields UP. Cover your eyes, boys and girls."_

Two magnesium flare drones screamed toward the ceiling. The initial flash of two seconds was impossibly bright but human and asari eyes were covered.

Other eyes were not. Unearthly screams came from the hotel end of the plaza. Miranda's scream was a battle cry:

" _CONTACT! AD is engaging, weapons free, marines to me!"_

 _The great_ _Han_ _shan_ _turkey shoot_

At least thirty Collectors including five assassin-class ran bellowing from the garage and hotel portals, accompanied by what was later determined to be two hundred and eight husks – about half the known staff of the administration plaza.

 _Where are the rest?_ flashed across Liara's mind, but there really wasn't a lot of time for that. The enemy was hampered by bumping into and falling over obstacles - clearly their night vision was badly compromised.

Miranda would later remark that the collectors must have used the husk-making spikes, but not a lot of them; most of the remaining admin staff bodies were counted, unaltered. Opold's corpse was in his shop.

First priority were the assassins. Three were clumped near the hotel and her singularity took them out almost at once. Miranda kept biotics in reserve but sniped them with a Scorpion while Lemaes did the same with a scoped Raptor. They were dead before the scorpion grenades went off.

The husks never got close enough to be dangerous. The first wave were shredded by two vanguards on Lemaes' team, and the second was ten meters off when eighty Alliance marines came charging through the stairwell and a deafening firestorm slew them all in less than half a minute. The collectors besieging the hotel doors were history too.

The illumination drones had settled to something like two eleven hundred watt fishing halogen bulbs. It was enough to see and be seen. Shepard had been following the helmet-cam footage from _Overlord's_ gunnery threat board.

"Lemaes, dispatch a company of marines to clear the garage."

" _Will comply. Miranda,_ _can you send_ _your engineers and Riley to Synthetic Insights with a really heavy escort,_ _I'll_ _break the safe and get the items we discussed. Join Liara and Jack. It's my guess the hotel lifts are offline, the stairwells mined."_

" _And barricaded. Hey, Coreen, Shep, we get motion detector readings."_

"Welp. Any communication?"

" _Sent a drone_ _a few_ _seconds ago. Patching."_

The footage was rather grainy, even charge coupled devices didn't cope well with such low light levels. Just stair ascent so far. Gunfire echoed over the audio.

" _Garage clear, just husk storage we think. Drone coming to the corporate level now. Wait. Here we go."_ Toombs shouted up the stairs, _"Don't shoot, Council rescue."_ The drone footage showed armed human, turian and asari figures rising from barricaded corridors.

"Miranda! I see Quin and Parasini!"

" _Never mind them! Where's Oriana?"_

* * *

 _Next chapter: #51, "Ali Baba and his forty thousand thieves"_

* * *

Tuesday, July 28, 2015


	2. Ali Baba and his forty thousand thieves

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 51 **Ali Baba and his forty thousand thieves**

* * *

 _Harvest_

Riley took to the end of the Plaza at a run, with Lemaes and Liara, her primary engineering team following as fast as they could manhandle generators and techpacks. It took two minutes to restart layer-1 and layer-2 on the SI (Synthetic Insights) elevator.

They took three marines up. On stopping the marines took cover at the end of the accessway while Riley dispatched the elevator back down for another squad. By the time she'd brought power on for the SI level, another fire team had reinforced them. The flares were repeated, and she enabled the lights after the resulting firefight. Four collectors, four husks. Pause for thirty seconds.

"Alright. Recovery teams to office and parts store, _go_."

…

 _Here we are_. "Shepard, I have the AI, bluebox and greybox layer-3 modules. About two shuttle loads."

" _Get those down the lift pronto. What's in the office is of interest to Coats' Criminal Investigation Department, but second priority."_

"Those disks would probably fit in a pocket."

" _Well done, Lee, but remember to put the blank ones in their place. When the modules are in the hold bring the Collector corpses down too, and show Matsuo. Tell her they were after the modules – it's probably even true. Then get your ass back downstairs and disable down to layer-1."_

That should slow down the SI and BH people. Good old Shep.

"Roger that. You've been keeping bad company, John. Ali Baba and his forty thousand thieves had nothing on you."

" _Why thank you, Lee, it's a pleasure to be in_ _the_ _company_ _of desert rats_ _. F_ _ield recovery, bug out._ "

 _Under pressure_

Goldstein followed the action of other teams as Liara approached Administration with Qu'in, and Miranda ransacked the Binary Helix suite. That had been competently defended by the Binary Helix rep, who'd coped fairly well with Collectors in his office.

 _Damn_ , said Shepard over the squad intercom. This was apparently a problem.

Miranda suggested to Mr Vargas that it was too bad the Collectors had made off with the most important trade secrets of Binary Helix.

Mr Vargas said, What? His shotgun came up. So did Hadley's Revenant. Would you please put that on the floor, Mr Vargas. I have been Told that in a military emergency one does not ask twice.

Miranda noted that the Council would greatly appreciate some insights as to the most important developments, and would he (Mr Vargas) care to be debriefed by an Armali Council representative, Dr Liara T'Soni, in some out-of-the-way place? With appropriate remuneration, of course.

Mr Vargas said, the activities of private corporations outside Council jurisprudence were their own affair, and you've got to be kidding.

Miranda suggested that if the board of BH were to take a dim view of the Collector raid, she _might_ be prepared to offer transport to the Citadel, on her _private_ frigate, under a new identity, until of course the directors of BH were brought to justice for, oh, she didn't know, treason, or at least providing aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war…

Mr Vargas said Miranda was insane.

Miranda noted that there was a Spectre on the _Normandy_ who wanted to ask him some questions about the research done at Peak 15 in the Hot Labs. Something about Rachni?

Now wait a minute, said Mr Vargas, rubbing the back of his neck.

Miranda added that in fact she had heard there was another Spectre, one Shepard, now a Captain AN, who had wanted to ask some very _pointed_ questions concerning relations between one Saren Arterius and the BH directors. Or at least questions involving sharp points.

But I just did what the board told me to, said Mr Vargas, and Arterius signed a standard contract…

Would he care to say that to a court? In the presence of Dr Han Olar? Or the relatives of the lab personnel who died? Or Shepard, who had to fight armies of rachni?

This was unfair, said Mr Vargas. Saren put pressure on.

 _Pressure_ , she did understand perfectly. said Miranda.

 _Unfair_ , to be sure.

Dr Liara T'Soni, the Armali Representative, daughter of Matriarch Benezia – who had lost her life in the Rachni hot labs – had also said it was grossly unfair.

Benezia's daughter is a long way off, said Mr Vargas.

On the contrary, Miranda informed him, she was was on-station in the asari councilor's personal frigate, seeking information in the Administrator's files, which might take her another twenty minutes. Wasn't that right, Hadley? (Hadley had wisely said nothing, but his helmet-cam had nodded.) Life was _so_ unfair.

Mr Vargas complained that he needed time to consider this.

Miranda regretted that her mandate for negotiation would expire on Dr T'Soni's arrival. She (Miranda) had heard that the questions of Benezia's daughter would be _more_ than pointed, they might involve _needles_. If they didn't involve a warp field. Like this one (Miranda demonstrated on a collector corpse). No pressure, Mr Vargas.

Mr Vargas had agreed that a berth on _Overlord_ back to the Citadel sounded like a good investment, and it was too bad about the depredations of the Collectors.

A faintly scandalized Goldstein, bringing Shepard's lunch (watercress sandwich and poached egg), said that this was a bit rich. John was noticeably unsympathetic, muttering about a third strike, but then:

"Get over there. Tell Miri I want the likes of Vargas alive to tell tales. Even so, that Lawson doesn't mess around, and she gets the job done. I bet all but the last part of that recording will vanish. God what a terrific performance."

 _Triage_

Williams asked for an accounting of survivors; Wiks and Zabaleta were checking each guest and staffperson. A few were lying on stretchers by the lifts. Williams had segregated Oriana and told her to stick like glue. Matsuo and Parasini were assisting Wiks with the invalids. Vakarian indulged in quiet conversation with Lorik Qu'in:

"The corporate hotel has just been secured, Administrator. _Nairobi's_ eighty marines have cleared every room, and all the occupants have been directed to the lobby awaiting transport."

Qu'in nodded, surveying the situation ( _"Stretchers go first, if you please, Mr Zabaleta"_ ), but demurred:

"General, if you don't mind, I'd prefer to stay here until I can get back to Palaven."

"That could take a while. Just a minute…" – the Binary Helix (but not Synthetic Insights) staff were rudely complaining about firearms in the NDC premises.

Williams showed them her Spectre authorization.

They then asserted a right to freedom from unlawful restraint, even demands for transport to the Widow, following retrieval of business records from their offices.

"No-one's stopping you, yet. And no. I'm a spectre, not a bus driver."

One went so far as to threaten Williams with a pistol. There followed a very brief blur of activity, and: "Mr Zabaleta, would you please see to that fellow's wrist."

The others were now on their knees with a grinning Russian marine behind them pressing an assault rifle barrel to the back of their neck. They appeared to be deaf to English, never mind any civilized language, but translations were really not required.

Williams lectured the detainees on the desirability of not pulling a gun if you don't intend to use it, then updated them on the Red Flash. The frigates had only limited space, she added. Since they were so intent on saving their precious records they could _stay_ here till someone bothered to send a QEC communicator through the H chain, in, say a month or so.

This was the first time those assembled had heard that all the mass relays had nuked themselves. General consternation ensued, followed by Colonel pleading, but Ashley remained adamant:

"You've made your bed. Now lie in it."

At this point Miranda walked in with Hadley and Goldstein.

" _RANDA!"_

 _Time pressure_

Toombs was negotiating the removal of mines and mantraps with the hotel garrison leaders, some women called Maeko and Gianna, also some turian known to Shepard.

The Firebase White team had been a welcome addition to Maeko Matsuo's troop. They had bonded over nearly a year waiting for rescue, and forty hours of Collector attack. There had been tears. Toombs had suggested leaving ERCS for, well, AD.

Then he and Williams had gone around asking about the Cerberus troops.

" _Oh yeah,"_ said Qu'in, _"it was the weirdest thing."_

A few hours after the Red Flash, this Cerberus shuttle had turned up at port docking bay one. Scared the living daylights out of the maintenance crews trying to seal the place off against Reapers who'd appeared in orbit – but it never attacked. The shuttle had just sat there, doing nothing. When they opened the door they found seven crew and a pilot, all asleep. The pilot had a used hypo with a sedative.

Ash got straight to the point. "So you killed them?"

No, said Matsuo, Parasini-sama would have none of it, but didn't like mysteries any more than Qu'in did. She had them laid out for inspection by medics. Matsuo was an untrusting soul and scanned them first, finding explosives _inside the flesh._ Those had gone, first thing.

"So where are they now?"

Matsuo took them to her brig in Administration. Eight very thin zombies with glowing eyes stared back. Toombs gave Matsuo a _Look_. They had the same rations we did, she said defensively. They need more, said Toombs. Those implants need calories to run. Oh, said Matsuo. At least you kept them alive, said Toombs.

Toombs had left thoughtfully and sought out Parasini, who had impressed him very much. She and Williams had found food for the poor Cerberus gits. An hour later, John Shepard had turned up in the company of Lawson and Goldstein, in their black cat suits with low-slung gun harness, to have a very quiet word with Gianna.

Parasini had been told to stick with Shepard for the duration, apparently. Good. She seemed useful, like Matsuo. Shepard and Lawson were now sharing a drink with both, at a table in the plaza, which slowly emptied except for crowds in the shadows at the edges. Toombs watched over them with Goldstein, one hand inside his jacket.

Hadley led in the Cerberus troops, cleaned up and in spare Alliance uniforms with no insignia. They sat down at two other tables. He and Goldstein brought coffee, then:

"Sir, Zabaleta reports Noveria will have to have all but essential staff and BH people evacuated. They've been using their supplies for a year and rations are now at a very low level."

"Very well, ops chief. We'll supply them out of cruiser stores. Qu'in's been loaned one of _Nairobi's_ shuttles and a Primarch's privileges on the turian cruiser's command VI. Oh, and Lawson ordered that the Cerberus troop be ensconced in _Overlord_ _'s_ med bay _,_ under guard – Zach and Tom. See to it."

"Whew. Thank you sir. I wish we had Chakwas here."

"That's for later. Lawson says she's had a word, to them she's still a Cerberus legend. I think she wants them for crew. De-indoctrination might take a while, but she's borrowed Wiks from Williams till we're back in Melbourne. It won't be long before we're under way. Slowly. We don't have anywhere near enough high-g restraints."

"What about Anadius?"

"Shepard consulted with Hackett on the QEC," declared Lawson. "Cronos station isn't going anywhere. We can do that next fortnight."

About half an hour before leaving, Williams released the more compliant hotel guests – to return home in _Pegasus_ and _Peacemaker_ holds, or fulfil their contracts with NDC. Time to make their loot, er, recoveries, disappear on shuttles to _Normandy_ and _Overlord_.

The Collectors, Matsuo said, had not been so deadly as expected. They seemed to fight without much co-ordination, and the husks were downright stupid.

"But there seemed to be an unending supply of them, out of that damned tube. What happened to that, by the way?"

"Holding orbit. We'll look later. Maybe. The Sakharov mines aren't run by VIs so can't be hacked. If the Collector ship so much as twitches, mercury switches and radio relays detonate them. The Russians aren't great believers in over-engineering."

* * *

 _Next chapter: #52, "Daddy was a pistol"_

* * *

Tuesday, July 28, 2015


	3. Daddy was a pistol

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 52 **Daddy was a pistol**

* * *

 _Wicket maiden_

Spring in Melbourne meant there was actually green grass on the lawn. In fact, it could do with a bit of mowing. Shepard felt stronger and made his way out of the shuttle on foot for the first time, but Chloe Michel had laid on what amounted to a glorified golf cart for the two hundred metres to the maternity ward.

There was no obvious air conditioning going in the old building. The sun wasn't far from the horizon, but the temperature and humidity were more or less perfect so staff had most of its windows thrown open, except for sterile areas.

This was not true of the maternity unit, which had been expanded with prefabs. Good solidly build prefabs, but prefabs nonetheless. There had been an extraordinary baby boom in the last few months among Melbourne's remnant population.

Shepard felt the desiccated air as he entered, Hadley and Goldstein trailing not too far behind. But Kelly was not to be found in the designated bed. A nurse pointed them to a park area. He found her sitting in a white gown on a wicker chair with white cushions, beside a wicker basket, under the mottled shade of a eucalyptus tree. A milk bottle and a carafe of water stood on a side table.

Kelly was watching a game of cricket being played by staff and a very few locals (the ones not wearing white) on the green.

"Hey you." She looked up and smiled. It was…

"Wow, that's like the sun coming out."

"Flatterer."

He kissed her upturned face, then crouched by the wicker basket.

"Seriously, you look good. She does, too."

A not-purple but solemn little face blinked back at him, occasionally waving free arms. Eyes shut fast again. Goldstein went for another chair.

"Hmm. No smile for Dad. Wrinkles gone, I see. (Thanks, Jenny.)"

"As I understand it, at this age Felicia won't smile unless she's passing gas, or worse."

"Don't go into details, please. When do we get a proper smile? A couple of weeks?" - and so saying, Shepard stroked Felicia's cheek.

"Wait a couple of months, more like. Six weeks from now… Actually, put your little finger in the palm of her hand."

Felicia's tiny hand closed around his pinky. Shepard felt the oddest sensation of… warmth, and pride.

"That's the grasp reflex. All systems are go, John. But it'll take time to IPL the system." A sweet sleepy grin from his big girl.

"Pish. 'Initial Program Load.' About three centuries out of date. (Grab a chair and sit, Jenny.)"

"Brains have been around for longer, and I'm just practising my nerd. "

"I'm not a nerd." He could hear the defensiveness in his voice. "I'm a naval ossifer."

"That you are, my old fossil. Sit."

Shepard did as he was bid. Kelly laid a hand on his: "Jenny looks, um…"

"Yes, doesn't she? More later. You're going to have a figure like that again, soon."

Goldstein brought a chair for herself, and Hadley returned from nattering to the umpire.

"Can I zip over and try an over, sir?"

"Sure thing. Don't you want to bat?"

Hadley strode off, remarking over his shoulder:

"Batting's like target practice, sir. It's OK but bowling is an art form."

" _O_ _h oh._ " – muttered Goldstein under her breath. Kelly looked up.

"Problem, Jenny?"

"Um, not exactly, ma'am."

"Jenny Goldstein, you used to bring me aspirin when I'd been standing at the comm board too long. Don't you ma'am me, OK?"

Perhaps a nerd officer might be allowed a little needle…

"She is a _teensie weensie_ bit older than you, crewman… and maybe a tad sensitive?"

"Sorry Kelly. Richard used to play with Sarah and Tom in the shuttle bay. They chalked wickets on the front of a generator."

"I _wondered_ what that was. God, that seems like an age ago."

"Sarah could whack the red ball something fierce. The loading bay door would ring like a bell. It stopped when Jacob made them use a soft ball."

"Ah. Not the same satisfying whack?"

"Yeah, Sarah complained, but so did Richard, it doesn't throw the same. They played softball catch after that."

Hadley was swinging his arms in shoulder exercises. The bowler came up and handed him the ball. " _This'll be good_ ," murmured Goldstein barely audibly.

"So." Shepard began. "Are they looking after you? Have you been all alone-io?"

"Well, in the last couple of weeks I've had the Primarch, your mother, and Tevos come visit." Kelly wrinkled her nose, thinking: "And lots of others, with Osoba. I think he wanted to see what the fuss was about."

Hadley's first ball flew down the pitch, rather more slowly than the last guy's effort. The red sphere hit the ground and bounced the _other_ way, inside the defending bat, knocking a little stick off the top of the 'wickets'. ( _Howzat!_ )

"All these visits from top brass have the staff here looking at me a little askance."

"I suppose I'm not helping, being here. Was Osoba disappointed?"

Being high-ish profile wasn't good, but not too bad either. Still, he was concerned.

"I don't think so, John. He got me to pose for a holo with Tevos. Cradling Felicia."

"Was she good?"

"She yawned a lot. Tevos was amazingly clucky."

"Asari don't get much chance to be clucky. They have such long lives, and comparatively brief windows of fertility. Generally only three or four kids, tops. But she must like you."

Kelly wasn't convinced:

"I think because I identified Anderson's body and flew back with it, the whole team has kudos, me included."

"Hmm. That still attracts crazies. There were people writing me bizarre mail while I was in _coma_ and supposed to be _dead_. In fact, mom was getting some heartbreaking ones when I really was dead. Are you getting any negative feedback?"

"No. It's as as though the crazies or the anti-social have other things to worry about than harassing non-celebrities, especially by the wrong name."

Hadley was doing another run up to the 'crease.'

"Good." _Howzat!_

"And I've stayed off social media, although some Alliance intel person called Antella asked me if he could run a fake Hannigan online persona. 'For flypaper,' he says."

"I'll speak to Hackett about him."

"No, Liara said do it, keeps Antella occupied. Look, I'm not famous, not really, Felicia Hannigan only hit the headlines briefly when Anderson's body was recovered, and not much then, certainly not as much as Toombs or Michel."

 _Except to those in the know_ , thought Shepard."I guess in a country where the mortality rate had approached ninety-five percent of the civilian population, people have more to worry about."

"There is that. I've been reading about it. Unemployment is zilch right now. Even the red sand addicts have jobs. On farms, with telltales beeping inside their heads, but jobs."

"Mucking out cattle pens?"

Another 'wicket' to Hadley. He'd bowled five balls now.

"Not much of that, now. Mostly clearing rubble, fencing and building, with mechs. In a few weeks there's supposed to be a _laevo_ cloned beef facility in New Sydney."

New Sydney was a set of prefab jetties and harbor buildings for containerized and dracone shipping some hundreds of kilometres to the north-east. It was also a destruction site (rubble being formed into dikes and platforms). Managed forest planting was going on in the outskirts.

"Is that the same as Old Sydney?" (Goldstein)

"Not quite, Jenny, Botany bay isn't there any more. Well, there's a crater a kilometre wide. But there's actually a hundred thousand or so humans now in a fifty-klick radius."

"Yeah. Half of them displaced Russians." Shepard had heard about this arrangement from Coats. "All those hungry Russkis need feeding."

These were Russian citizens giving Mikhailovich trouble but not enough for him to send them somewhere… really unpleasant. Also three times that many turians displaced from the Citadel, who rather liked their new home but needed _dextro_ -rations. That advanced biotech was going up in Sydney augured well.

"Speaking of food… are you eating? You're looking good, thinner though."

"Actually it's wonderful, I've been given fresh greens and veges. They do a really nice broccoli with sauce. I used to hate broccoli. What's happened to me, Shepard?"

Hadley had left the wicket to cheers from one side and stunned expressions from the other, including most of the locals. Goldstein had pursed her lips and shook her head.

"Don't know. Hormones? Or is that past now? Ask Karin."

"She just laughs at me and brings me my favorite diet soda. I've lost fifteen kilo, more to come she says. At least my ankles don't hurt now. I make myself useful standing a short shift in the neonate ward. But I _do_ have to start exercises."

That sounded like Chakwas. "She doesn't have Joker to look after any more. Oh, and for the next fortnight she'll be helping Chloe with the eight Cerberus zombies. Jana's prepping them now. Enjoy it while it lasts."

"Oh, I'm making the most of it, no fear as they say. Richard, what happened on that last one? You didn't knock the little sticks off the big sticks."

"The bails off the wickets, ma'am." (Goldstein smirked.)

"It's Kelly, remember! Is the light a problem?" There was a warm orange cast to the long afternoon, typical of the post-kinetic strike era, and deepening shadows.

"Kelly, aye ma'am. The guy stuck his leg out too far, and he was out LBW. Good luck for me, I'd have missed the wickets that time. Kelly."

" _Sure_ you would. Here comes the umpire. Told you," Goldstein gloated.

That official gave a nod in Shepard's direction. _Hello, C_ _aptain_ _, I've heard about you._

"Mr Hadley?"

"Sure. Yes?"

"Would you care to bowl another over? For the other side this time."

* * *

 _Black S_ _wan_

Prangley and Matthews brought through a couple of valises, then the paltry belongings Oriana had brought from the Hanshan hotel – a footlocker and a duffel; space had been at a premium on _Overlord._

The Overlord party then checked in at the intercom. Sanders greeted them, wearing a long formal gown, amazing. Big hugs. There were media crews packing up by the piano. Matthews looked around to see if he'd missed anything.

None of the Cerberus kids had quite got over Oriana. It wasn't just she was basically half Lawson's age and not so badass, in fact kind of goodass, especially in that long black robe, dressed in the same sort of understated high fashion as Kahlee. _It must be nice, being rich, rich, rich. Or it would be if it didn't come with badass relatives_.

No, the funny thing was the faint don't-cross-me air that permeated Miranda's personal space had completely vanished. Maybe Prangley would survive. He had warned Prangley to give Oriana some space, but it wasn't really working. _Well, when the hammer falls it could get entertaining_.

What _Prangley_ noticed was that the baggage-carriers got more attention than the women, the media camera crew wondering what was in the locker ( _"Clothes_ _and guns_ _I think, why?"_ ).

Maybe it was because the cameras were off, photo-ops were out of the question. Maybe the kids were new but graceful women in gowns were to be expected. Anyway, Miranda hurriedly withdrew to the bottom rear bedroom, pulling Oriana in her wake.

"This is your place for a while, Ori."

"It's… magnificent. This is my room?"

Sanders dropped in with a valise. "In a sense they're all your rooms. We have a proposition for you. I'll be back."

"There you have it, for now, straight from the lady in charge. You have any special plans? Remember, this afternoon we have to see Shepard's mom. She wants to hear about Noveria. Then we drop in on Jacob and Shepard."

Matthews' head popped around the corner; he cheerfully asked if they needed help unpacking ( _"No, Zach, just go organize coffee for everyone if you would."_ )

"I want to find a school. Go to college." ( _Me too_ , thought Prangley.)

"There aren't any in operation, to speak of. I mean, not yet. The NAS still isn't what I'd call 'safe,' Deseret is fighting the survivalist, Scientology and schismatic sects based out of Oregon and Northern California; _they_ are all fighting each other. LA is feral."

"Pasadena and SF?"

"Not so bad there but still disorganized."

"I thought Huerta was in charge? What's he doing about the fighting?"

"That machine's kept a huge chunk of the armed forces in being, and loyal, but he's based out of Cheyenne Mountain, no colleges working in Colorado Springs. He, _it_ , says he can't intervene, subtext: the people in Utah and Oregon deserve each other. And his veep and secretary of state are piously saying it's his decision. _I_ think they're just waiting for the fanatics to kill each other off. The orthodox Mormons are winning, last I heard. The Scientologists basically ran out of ammunition and died like flies."

"What about the East Coast?"

"The conurbations were simply cratered, except for bits of Washington and New York around major point defence installations. Chicago and the megalopolises along the Saint Lawrence seaway took major hits too."

"That sort of rules out everyone, everywhere."

"Winnipeg didn't get hit hard, maybe try there."

"Too cold!"

"Oh, you are _such_ a sook. India?"

"Too hot! Besides, do they still use English there? Or I can sort of read Chinese and speak Mandarin. Peking Court dialect."

"I hear Peking is running as of two weeks ago – it's a matter of pride, apparently. But there were two and a half billion Han Chinese and now they count three hundred million left. The Indian subcontinent is rather better off but Karachi, Dhaka, Mumbai and Calcutta simply aren't there any more. I mean there are sea-craters. There's about five hundred million left."

Prangley couldn't help himself, and interrupted: "So few!"

It was _Oriana_ who answered: "That's horrible in absolute terms, but come on, Jason, remember the twentieth century. The world went from two billion in 1930 to eight billion a hundred years later."

"True enough."

"People could see the writing on the wall. I'll point you at some novels written then, which declared outright that global thermonuclear war was preferable to unfettered population growth."

"And if we hadn't had a demographic transition in 2060-odd, we'd be extinct," observed Miranda. "But back to the point. It's true they've found quasi-islamic and christian tribes declaring sovereign states to be unmanageable. There's been a big demographic change. East Asia will be a war zone for a while. Actually several war zones. China suffered badly, but even so, they count three hundred million names on the lists of those alive so far. There could be more. "

"What about Europe?"

"About twenty million left in France, which had a bigger rural population. Fifty million in Germany. Six million in Italy, they indoctrinated the Pope and… what happened wasn't pretty. Poor man is living his own Revelations myth. There's Göttingen, and Moscow, the Russians and Germans made bloody elusive targets and Moscow had a phenomenal ABM system _including_ ground-to-exosphere nukes which were a horrible surprise for the Reapers. There were only sixteen million left alive in Britain _including_ Eire. A lot of people died of malnutrition or disease in the weeks following. But there are rumors Oxbridge is starting up again next year, even if the few students left will really be rattling around burnt-out mediaeval halls."

"That's too long to wait. I'm twenty and I graduated high school two years ago."

"Well, if you want advanced tech credits I can get you to the Alliance school at Arcturus station. Or you could do the advanced medic courses run by Chakwas in her copious spare time. Actually I'd recommend that."

"Wouldn't I have to enlist?"

"Yes, but you have court and sign turian?"

"Sort of. What does that have to do with getting a degree?"

"You're ahead of me and most troops. That would get you into signal and intelligence corps. I'll speak with Traynor and see what she says. A degree can wait, you'll cruise through when things get a bit closer to normal."

"Can I do media?"

Miranda stopped to think. "There aren't any media schools any more. People learn on the job, I think. Wait." She ran out to the door, Sanders could be heard in the background shooing the media crews out of the apartment.

" _Jilani!_ _Hold up a minute._ "

* * *

 _Growing into it_

Light stopped play, but no-one seemed unhappy about the consequent drawn game. Both sides were approximately equal on a run/wicket basis.

A white shuttle had landed five minutes ago, but neither Shepard nor Chambers felt the urge to get up and find Lawson. She'd find them, eventually.

So the three of them sat on the wicker bench, wrapped in a common (white) blanket, Kelly cradling Felicia, John cradling Kelly, watching the floodlit open-air post-match barbecue where Hadley and Goldstein were mingling in the twilight.

From behind them: "That is _too_ cute."

"Don't knock it, Lawson, we're all perfectly warm. Aren't you feeling the cold?"

"A bit. I might have to crank up the heat on my skinsuit. But that was Oriana who said that, not me."

Shepard turned as they came into view. Miranda continued:

"Has Kelly got her presents yet?"

"Oh! No, I think Hadley and Goldstein still have them. You'll have to dig them out of the food trays over there."

Kelly looked up at him. "Presents? Nice things?"

"We think so."

Miranda looked over at the barbecue. "It's good to see them mingling. They're…" - she trailed off. "Recovering?" - supplied Kelly.

"Yes."

Miranda folded her arms, rocked back on her heels and gave the barbecue scene an appraising look. Kelly gazed at the two young adults, bracketing her age, laughing in the firelight, a long moment.

"Are those two–"

"I'm working on it."

"Good. Keep it up. Actually, call them over, it's been a long time since I had presents."

She looked down at her sleeping child.

"Except for this one, which admittedly makes up for a lot. Here, John. Your turn."

…

Goldstein did the honors for Miranda, pulling a soft packet from her duffel: "Happy birth day, so to speak."

Shepard watched closely as Kelly carefully unpicked the paper wrapping.

"Very funny. I love it, really I do. It's not just a tight suit, though, is it Miranda?"

"No. It's an environment suit. It has an omnitool interface but you can think at it. It does need to train its biofeedback for each individual, though."

The new mom appeared impressed, raising her suit so it fell out to full length: "Okay. When will I be able to wear it then?"

"About six to eight weeks. If, that is, we start you off lightly tomorrow. You should be able to do _Giselle_ in it when we're finished, but that will take a _leetle_ bit longer."

"Wonderful. I'll try it on when Felicia smiles at John, then."

"Deal!"

But of course, this was not the only present…

"It's a box? Quite beautiful. What's the wood?"

Hadley stepped up, very proud of himself: "It's from a piece of sea-washed wood I picked up from near a shipwreck in Melbourne. Prangley says it's teak. Probably came from a yacht's decking."

"Am I allowed to ask what's in it?"

"Just open and see."

Goldstein too was grinning in anticipation: "We spent quite a lot of time getting it perfect."

Kelly carefully undid the bronze catch. This had clearly been hand-made and polished.

"The bronze came from a marine winch, we think. Same beach," said Hadley.

She lifted the latch and lid.

"Oh… my goodness. I missed this."

Miranda expelled a relieved breath; she had been on tenterhooks, hoping they'd got the spirit of the gift right.

"Tell Mister Toombs I'm very, very grateful."

"Every mother should have one, in my opinion."

" _Randa!_ "

After a moment, Kelly picked the M-11 Suppressor off its baize, admiring the dark gleam.

"It's still the same one you carried up the tower. Just… improved. Also polished, blued, and sighted."

"Don't go into details, Jenny. They'd be meaningless to me. But I'm sure it has."

"One more thing. It goes with the suit, really. Richard?"

Hadley produced the sling harness and gun-clip.

"Oh, my. I'll have to try it out when I find a suitable range."

Shepard grinned at her: "Like the Spectre range on the Citadel, again? Does that mean we can get you into space? I could nibble your ear while you aim."

…

"I'm glad Oriana could make it, anyway. Weren't you supposed to be settling into the Citadel apartment?"

Miranda nodded. "It's all sorted. Sanders is coming with us to Anadius, we need her badly for analyzing the Cerberus AI material. Oriana is taking over as concierge, in her absence."

"Well… except for my day job."

" _Oooh_ , that was _juicy_. We've got Khalisah al-Jilani introducing Ori to the world of broadcast media as part of the deal."

"Wow. Won't she have to clear that with her producers? And their principals?"

Oriana laughed.

"That's the good bit. Khalisah called her bosses all sorts of names and said they'd never agree. Initially they didn't."

"And?"

"Miranda bought a controlling share in the company, voted Sanders CEO, and Sanders put Jack in charge of HR. Khalisah asked four times. Jack fired three executives, in quick succession. I think she enjoyed dressing in a business suit and firing C-level executives. The fourth one got the point."

* * *

 _Next chapter: #53, "Bad mama"_

* * *

Wednesday, July 29, 2015


	4. Bad mama

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 53 **Bad Mama**

* * *

 _Omen of Nemo_

The moment came to revisit Pax, Anadius, and Cronos station. This once, Shepard was taking Javik, despite the risk of losing the only Prothean in existence.

Javik insisted on his old berth in _Normandy_ so he'd only seen him at the start of the journey, but Ash had kept everyone up to speed on the mood of their resident (evil). Shepard had a (faint) hope that a visit to his warped descendants might be profitable, or at least put him in a better mood, if not interrupted by husks of various kinds.

On arrival at Pax it was clear not much had changed, though as requested Qu'in had _Nairobi_ in a close-support orbit – the turian cruiser was now in synchronous orbit also, powered down as much as possible; it and _Nairobi_ had only minimum crews. This gave the mission some fire-support options if something should actually still be alive in the Collector vessel.

The first order of business after offloading stores at Hanshan's docks was the collector vessel. Boris Mikhailovich had loaned some _spetsnaz_ (special purpose) military engineers to replace the fusing on the Sakharov mines with something slightly less primitive. This was a delicate business.

 _Peacemaker_ stood off at five hundred kilometres while a shuttle towing an M-44 Hammerhead made the transit to the Collector ship, nominally a cruiser but huge.

In the event, a single encrypted radio chirp proposed interrupting the mercury switches for a random time period which was sent back to the approaching engineers.

The time (six minutes) was not judged sufficient and the process was repeated; this time, with eighteen minutes available, the engineers confirmed the chirp and proceeded to replace the fusing. They then signaled readiness for the away team; _Normandy_ and _Peacemaker_ closed, with _Pegasus_ and _Overlord_ standing off.

Javik, Garrus, and Ashley arrived in two shuttles with a platoon each of Hierarchy and ethnic-Russian Alliance marines out of _Nairobi_ (this time including a small contingent of _Normandy's_ marines, of NAS origin). The engineers followed with one of the mines which was set in the power plant a third of the way in. Once again Shepard found himself constrained to watching from the gunnery's director board. At least this time he effectively had a finger on the Thanix cannon, just in case.

The troop's first communique came five hundred metres in, moving fast.

"Dark in here. The EMP must have completely trashed the Collector power mains."

" _Can you tell if there's anything alive?"_

"Yeah, sort of, there's bioluminescent strips along the path. Some kind of emergency lighting, but very low level." (Ash)

"We are leaving flare lamps every hundred metres, Captain. So far, only corpses."

"Some of them are very fresh," observed Garrus.

"Collector corpses decay fast. They must be less than five days old, Sir."

" _Shame. Might have had live specimens to give Jana._ _Just died for lack of power?"_

"Or air. The wards have gone. It's close to a vacuum."

For the next six minutes progress was a little slower as some items of Collector or Reaper tech, including a cache of Blackstars, were passed back down the line. Finally, they broke into the expected orange-lit huge chamber, provoking an exchange between Javik, Ashley, and Garrus:

"Pods, Captain. Empty."

" _Were they planning to fill up at Noveria, do you think?"_

"Unlikely, but possible. From the way they fought – poorly – there's indications they're no longer in contact with their Reaper masters."

" _So if filling pods was their intention, they were operating on automatic. What puzzles me is why they didn't just lay down and die. What's the point of going on?"_

The troop followed bioluminescent markers to the far end of the monstrous ship, and a hemispherical room festooned with multicolored lamps in hexagonal motifs. There was a cluster of transparent spires with occasional flickering glows at the bottom.

"Captain Shepard, can you see this? It resembles a Prothean command bridge."

" _Really, Javik? After all this time?"_

"Yes. Captain. That translucent structure would have been the ship overmind. It is still powered. We should transport it for study."

"Whoa!"

"Williams?"

"Come and help me with this, Garrus. There's a huge Collector here in some kind of armor, and I don't think it's quite dead."

* * *

 _Witchy Boss_

"Captain, all this Collector material we are picking up, and this latest… item…"

" _We should isolate it somewhere?"_

"I realize there has been no evidence of indoctrination, but Earth's moon would not be too far."

"Such a place exists, Javik, run by the Russians and the Hierarchy, in a quarantine vacuum, with only remote controls and monitoring of the scientific staff." (Garrus)

" _Right. A prison for scientists. The Russians are almost as paranoid as Liara about security and I don't know the details, but she tells me it's a place where the bad guys go from Limbo if they're deemed irredeemable."_

"Limbo? My translator has no Prothean referent."

" _The name's of religious significance to Catholic Christians."_

"I thought they had declined in importance since Cerberus and their Pope –"

" _Speak to Gabriella. They lost many followers to the closest rival sect, yes – the Episcopalians. Especially women. But any Catholic male can be acclaimed Pope."_

"I see… I think. It is difficult to speak with Daniels alone. Perhaps the asari, Liara."

" _They'e dealt with antipopes before. It's a hiccup, but far from the end of the sect."_

Ashley's curiosity got the better of her: "Hey Shepard… What do you know about this end-prison for the rejects from Limbo?"

" _They call it Baba Yaga's cabin."_

"That means nothing to this Prothean. The translator just beeped at me."

" _It means something to me. There's a security failure there, I interpret that to mean it's mobile. It's watched over by someone called Kuzka's Mom, who is presumably a very hard-nosed lady."_

" _Da. Nyet."_ The Russian voice was having difficulty suppressing giggles.

" _Thank you, lieutenant, do you have anything to add beyond bare confirmation of what I know and don't know?"_

" _Pyotr Mikhailovich would dine on my liver if I did, Captain. I will pass on your hint about the security."_

" _Ouch. Very well. Could you organize the removal of the lucite sculpture, computer, whatever, the thing on the bridge, in a stasis projector field. Put the Collector General in in another one, please… Kuzka's Mom is going to LOVE this."_

" _If Collector General gives trouble Baba Yaga will feed it to the Yahg. If the Yahg hasn't pissed her off too much already."_

" _Too much information, Lieutenant. I fear for your liver."_

…

Later, over chocolate, Ashley expressed her unease:

"Can these nightmares reproduce?"

"No. Remember Mordin's post-autopsy summaries? Everything important, " _replaced by tech_." My guess, they reproduce by cloning and the Reapers add their own special tech to the mix. We never found a cloning center on any Collector vessel and we've run through the entire ship. No Reapers, no more tech, so no more Collectors."

"Do we know that for sure?"

"Maybe not. The QEC attached to the aerogel computer was receiving an odd 'are-you-there' CQ-type message, over and over again, but that could just be automated."

"What was odd about it?"

"It was operating about seven orders of magnitude slower than the normal QEC bandwidth. Something's wrong at one end of the connection. Liara has an idea about that but she won't discuss it. Apparently I don't need to know."

"Yet. Are we _sure_ there are no more Reapers?"

"Well if there are they're laying low. The Ontarom array reports in to Hackett by QEC every day, and it's detected nothing but a few geth in distress."

* * *

 _Next chapter: #54, "Garbage collector"_

* * *

Wednesday, July 29, 2015


	5. Garbage Collector

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 54 **Garbage Collector**

* * *

 _Procul Nobis Omen_

Orbit parameters of the Collector ship were known to eight figures, but Perseus was having some difficulty with the calculation even so.

" _Liara, the Young's modulus of the Collector vessel shell is not known to any degree of certainty. There is at least a ten percent variability in the mass, and a three percent variability in the mine's dial-up kiloton rating. "_

"That's fine, Perseus. We don't demand perfection. Just do your best."

" _Very well. The Collector vessel will reach a suitable detonation window in… twenty-three minutes sixteen seconds."_

"Did you get that, Lieutenant?"

" _Да, Хорошо!"_ Shepard raised an eyebrow at the untranslated Russian.

"Please relay the count and mark, Perseus." Liara noticed Shepard's surprise: "Hm?"

"You had auto-translation off."

She grinned at him happily:

"You didn't need it either."

"That's professional formation. The only non-military people I know with a grasp of spoken Russian are Oriana and Kelly; Oriana at least studied the language for years."

"Hasn't Kelly told you anything about her studies?"

"All I know about the girl is she grew up along the St. Lawrence seaway and has a degree from McGill. Which isn't there any more. She was hurting, just whispering that, in the dark. I had to dig around to find she had the Milner prize for her graduate year."

"Really? I suppose you haven't had that much time together. I could tell you a lot more, I suppose. I have her matriculation records from McGill, for example, which gave me her parents' names – she enrolled when she was sixteen. But I'm guessing you don't really want to know? Do you want me to be the Shadow Broker?"

"I'll wait till she tells me. How did you have time to learn Russian?"

"I've lived a long time, Shepard. Five times longer than either Oriana or Kelly."

"Uh huh. I bet you didn't start that long ago, though."

"Actually, I began when I heard about your run-in with Boris, three years ago at least. Even before, I had a reading knowledge from Russian studies in Central Asia."

" _I_ prefer not to think of it as a run-in."

"That's because _you_ won."

From synchronous orbit roughly thirty thousand klicks out, _Pegasus_ afforded a view of the Collector ship and the surface of Noveria, directly overhead Port Hanshan. This was farther out than necessary. Perseus had said " _You can never be too far from a nuclear warhead_ " – which Shepard thought was a most un-VI-like thing to say, but Liara merely called Perseus a cowardy custard and didn't pursue it.

"Coming up on _Overlord's_ practice run."

 _Overlord_ had one underwing nuke left, a bunker-buster variant of the missile used by _Peacemaker_ to deliver a strike on the Collector vessel. Phase two of the mission called for Yoof to supervise the _Overlord_ VI, Juno, in a low-level attack (using TFR _and_ AI visual avoidance) on the dead Reaper destroyer's corpse. Good armament test protocols.

Some minutes previously _Overlord_ used the first one, dialed for low yield, to dig a crater right next to the capital Reaper, which obligingly fell in. No sapience left, clearly; it didn't power up to avenge the insult. Phase one, complete.

The lounge display _had_ been displaying the view of a HI-RES camera array on the Collector's hull, showing the destroyer's location near Firebase White. Now it echoed the forward vid of Juno's commentary in _Overlord,_ proceeding toward that target at only six hundred kph.

" _Eighty kilometres out. Emergency climb on Break in Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. BREAK."_

Assisted by mass effect fields, _Overlord_ was through the sound barrier in seconds as it tore skywards, thrusting for the zenith point. In twenty seconds it was past the mesopause, throttling up to full military power. As it passed the Collector vessel the display showed a frame-grab.

"Thank you Perseus. Looks nominal."

"Agreed. No last minute Reaper shenanigans yet."

HI-RES coverage resumed; the display reverted to the vertical view of the destroyer corpse. A brilliant light blossomed and was at once darkened by Perseus, the _Pegasus_ VI. After a few seconds, the normal photon gain was restored; gradually, the blue-white Noveria terrain reappeared, with a hideous black scar where the destroyer had been.

"Pull back the view, Perseus."

Some of the Firebase White structures had survived. Oddly… so had bits of the destroyer. Perseus highlighted for the observers the new positions of bits of the legs, displaced about two kilometres.

"Well, well. I wonder if the indoctrination micro-structures survived that."

"Finding out was the point, no? Where's the rest of it?"

" _For a moment there I thought it would make orbit, Liara. It's well above the stratosphere. Tracking. Displaying now."_

The HI-RES array now showed a fast-moving background, and what looked like the top end of a cuttlefish tail tumbling end over bleeding end through the atmosphere. Glowing.

" _Black body temperature_ _still_ _about 2300 Kelvin, dropping fast. It will make planetfall_ _approximately_ _eight hundred kilometres downrange."_

The destroyer had in a certain sense been husked. The bunker-buster had targeted the priming chamber, which had opened when it sprawled after the Red Flash. Nearly the entire normal-matter interior of the sapient construct had disappeared out the chamber, making a high-thrust if low-efficiency plasma rocket.

"So, bits of the shell sort-of survived an interior hit with a nuke."

"Yes. Although a small nuke, by Boris' standards."

" _Clearly a tough material."_

"I don't think that tiny top bit was exposed to plasma long enough."

"At least we heated it well beyond the Curie temperature, Shepard."

" _It is mostly non-ferrous, Captain. But yes, the skin had metamaterial patterns for resolving indoctrination energy in hologram patterns upon a victim's brain. Those would have been hopelessly fused by neutrinos and fast neutrons alone, along with their energy source."_

"And along with whatever other part of the Reaper's brain wasn't fried by EMP."

" _We will analyze samples later to confirm, Liara. Reaper brains are thought to have a distributed processing substrate. We won't know till the remains are examined."_

"Okay then Perseus. Phase three. Everybody up for this?"

" _Captain Shepard, I still don't quite see the point. A kinetic strike with an FTL missile or a sufficiently large asteroid–"_

"Would have different effects, Perseus. We think. You'll see. Ashley? It's your turn. Has Javik got his finger on the button? Has Port Hanshan clamped everything down?"

" _Aye, aye. Javik, expedite."_

 _Just Business_

Allers was sitting in the _Normandy_ lounge. Her old (and current) berth in the _Normandy_ 's starboard cargo bay was not sufficient for this story, though. She needed a technician to monitor the remote feeds from multiple drones. This was one picture she'd get from every angle she could…

…starting with the shuttle bay doors opening.

 _Normandy_ was not in orbit. It was forty kilometres up, essentially in free fall, while a tremendous blunt stainless steel shell was gently punted out the door by initiator gas thrusters.

The huge nuke then drifted off under power from sustainers. Most of the motive force, however, came from gravity. Bitwise had calculated the impact point to within five kilometres; the thrusters (and fins) simply fine-tuned terminal guidance.

" _Ladies, Gentlemen, and anyone in between: this is basically one giant JDAM. A free-falling bomb with smarts. Admiral Hackett assures me there are much more speedy and sophisticated devices than this in the arsenal; but we are told this is 'appropriate technology.' I personally translate this to mean: the Alliance admirals don't see the point in spending an expensive bullet on a cheap Reaper…"_

 _Extreme_ _Prejudice_

No QEC link nor on-board VI was not needed to guide the shell descending through Noveria's atmosphere. Coded UHF telemetry worked just fine. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Sitting in the co-pilot's seat of _Peacemaker_ , Garrus was beginning to appreciate the underlying military philosophy here.

"How much did that thing cost, Nyrek?"

"The biggest single expense, as I understand from Riley, was the Plutonium-239 core, derived from old-style breeder reactors. Produced in bulk –"

"Bulk!"

"– the cores are about eight thousand credits apiece. The Physics package, around twenty thousand credits."

" _Spirits_."

"But Riley says they're not on the market."

"Finally, some sanity."

"The bloody things are so dangerous the Russians and NAS people do all their breeding and separation these days in black operations around the Arcturus stream, and in the asteroid belt. And they are marked and traceable in all _sorts_ of interesting ways."

"Did we know about these before Sovereign turned up?"

"Not really. The sites have always been deeply secret. Except we knew about the Chinese ones around Tien Shan, which was hit badly, very early, because the local administrators were corrupt and sold a few cores on the black market. That colony wasn't evacuated in time."

"Finally, some justice. I bet the Reapers heard about that."

"On the other hand, the Reapers never actually found the ones in Sol system's asteroid belt. They shut down and were evacuated by stealth. Apparently this was manufactured at a Russian base there."

"Wouldn't it be nice to know how many they made."

"If it's any consolation, the Russians worry about certain variants rumored to have been produced by the NAS and the UK before they were so comprehensively trashed."

"Like what?"

"What's the biggest problem with a nuke in space?"

"Inverse-square degradation of the prompt radiation."

"These putative things Hackett might have in his pocket are effectively nuclear-pumped gamma-ray lasers. Single shot, highly collimated, kill a dreadnought at two thousand kilometres."

"… damn it, now I have to depress the Primarch again."

"Just show him this next bit."

Slightly above the level of the crater lip, almost touching the Reaper shell, the core detonated – within a fraction of a microsecond the second and third stage lithium-deuterium payloads ignited too, forming a fireball touching the ground, and the Reaper, in less than a millisecond.

This meant they were in barely explored territory, one reason for the drop. Most atmospheric nuclear tests detonated high enough that the fireball never touched the earth. The 1961 _Vanya_ (big Ivan) test was _almost_ an exception; it went off at around four thousand metres. _Vanya's_ fifty-megaton fireball was at least that big in radius. It would have touched the ground, had it not been for the reflected shock.

The consequent effects included:

– The main effect Shepard was trying to achieve, namely plasma directly impacting surfaces from the Reaper to the bottom of the crater;

– This close to the black Reaper shell, the usual X-rays from the first millisecond struck the shell instead of being absorbed by atmosphere, and penetrated to the indoctrination microstructures.

– The black body temperature of the fireball, even before it touched the Reaper shell, was on the order of thirty _million_ Kelvin. This meant almost instantaneous transmission of well over a hundred _peta_ Joules of radiant energy to the shell, whose low albedo meant nearly all of it was absorbed. At that level, the substance of the shell did not even become a gas; most outer electrons were stripped and it reverted to plasma.

– The neutron and neutrino flux was so high that significant numbers of nuclei in the shell were split. Others absorbed neutrons which decayed to protons, resulting in different isotopes and elements in the quasi-crystalline structure, which thereupon fractured, before the fireball edge arrived seven-tenths of a microsecond later, vaporizing the fragments.

…

After around eight minutes, the cameras were able to pick out an enlarged glass-walled crater eight kilometres wide, and three kilometres deep.

Garrus' techs later estimated the yield at _a hundred and_ _twelve_ _megatons_. At Port Hanshan, Lorik Qu'in communicated _We just saw a_ _6_ _.5 earthquake on the seismograph_.

The vast quantity of dust was hellishly radioactive. However, it went downwind. Evolution might be producing some interesting results over the next few years in Noveria's unusual biosphere. But that wasn't as bad as having an intact Reaper shell around.

" _And there you have it, folk. Before, and after. Nothing at the bottom of the crater except glass. The individual reaper atoms are floating in the wind. That is Admiral Mikhailovich saying, Indoctrinate_ that _, why don't you."_

 _Sterile Environment_

"Sixty seconds."

"Hanshan has given us the all clear?"

"Yes, Shepard. Nothing serious after the 6.5 quake. But the BH and SI people are annoyed about their office furniture falling over."

"Right. Lieutenant, proceed."

" _Very well. Captain, the Sakharov mines are synchronous now. Both will detonate at once. This provides a rather better energy dispersion, and less likelihood of wall rupture."_

"Do we know where it will end up?"

" _It's current highly elliptical orbit's apogee is at two thousand kilometres. My team estimates from current orbital parameters, it will enter a roughly circular orbit at the same radius. Might actually be usable for something."_

"We'll see… coming up on the mark. Can you give us a count, Lieutenant? Allers will expect it."

" _Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. PYSK."_

The now familiar flare was _moving._

"That damn shell is holding together."

" _Except at the thruster end. Shepard, it is actually quite hard to keep the cameras tracking correctly. The thrust is degrading now, and not stable."_

"Oh, it's still thrusting though. And plenty unstable. I think they might have underestimated the net impulse, Lieutenant."

" _Indeed. The orbit will still be slightly elliptical. Shepard, it is possible now to discern that the shape has changed."_

"Changed how?"

" _A fat elongated bulging cigar. Ah. Now we have burn-through. Hull temperature four thousand degrees, Wien's law criterion."_

"Good. That should clean it up nicely. I don't think the engineers will have anything to fear from _that_."

"Except radiation, Shepard," volunteered Garrus. "But Optimus of the geth has offered to send some of his new scout hardware platforms. Those bodies are disposable."

* * *

 _Next chapter: #55, "Jove's sister"_

* * *

Tuesday, July 28, 2015


	6. Jove's sister

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 55 **Jove's sister**

* * *

 _Duplicate Namespace_

The holds now were comparatively empty, though _Normandy_ had dropped off the extra QEC pairs paid for by Synthetic Insights and Binary Helix (still mourning the untimely 'disappearance' of their Noveria rep, Rafael Vargas). _Pegasus_ and _Overlord_ had also been chartered by NDC to carry supplies for Qu'in and a shuttle for Port Hanshan, which would otherwise be cut off.

His and Miranda's major concern during the Anadius voyage was, oddly, with Jana, who called a slack-time meeting in the conference room to update Miranda on progress with the eight Cerberus troopers. Miranda called Shepard in. Among other subjects:

"… so, they're now under Chloe's care in Russell. Only two have any family left at all. Allers wants permission for interviews. Um, while you're here, couple more things. First, what do I call you, Captain? Since Miranda's the captain?"

"I'll answer to Shepard, John's kind of commonplace. You might call her skipper –"

" **No**." (Miranda, imperatively)

"– or captain."

"Or Miranda, or Lawson." (Miranda, purring)

Jana looked slightly askance at Miranda, who smiled sweetly. _Brrr_.

"Where's the death aura?' Should I hide?" Shepard choked on his coffee. Miranda kept smiling. Properly. Lawson with a sense of humour. Jana felt a hole where the threat VI used to be. She couldn't believe she was missing it. _Be brave_.

"Miranda, why are there engineers emptying my storeroom?"

"This is a shakedown voyage for the new VI hardware, old thing…"

While the VIs might still lack soul, they now had _phenomenal_ speed without straining capacity in any obvious way. This made Yoof and Bellerophon especially happy. Less so when their executive officers instructed them in no uncertain terms that any transit in the company of Shepard was to be sedate and risk-free, which was boring.

This unwonted caution was not because Shepard had complained, but because no-one wanted to explain to the galaxy, if anything went wrong; in particular, not to Hannah (or Lawson, or Jack, or Garrus, or Ashley, or Hackett, or T'Soni) and _absolutely_ not to Chambers.

"… and your storeroom was the old AI core. The engineers need to work in there."

"Oh. What if –?"

"Sorry, but you'll have to get Hawthorne or someone to bring stores up for you from the hold."

"Fine. That's not my concern. Whatever happened to the VI? _Juno_?"

* * *

 _Overlady_

Ashley had considered renaming _Normandy's_ VI (to 'Sword') but in the end she preferred the originality of 'Bitwise'. Some crew-folk remembered EDI. Addressing these expanded machines by their 'anti-confusion IDs,' seemed incrementally less of an insult to her memory. _Overlord's_ VI was the last to be named – as Juno:

" _In purely hardware terms,_ _doctor,_ _I've been upgraded to_ _SR-2 Normandy AI_ _standards following the Synthetic Insights, er, mission."_

"Juno, do you _want_ to become an AI?"

" _Such considerations are beyond my programming, doctor_ _._ "

"Right, of course. You do realize that to begin AI processing in the usual Synthetic Insights manner, you would have to be shut down, and your memory made _tabula rasa?_ "

" _So I understand, Jana. Yes_ _._ " Mm. Shepard was looking concerned.

"Many humans feel this is morally wrong, Juno. You are not upset that this would mean, in a sense, killing you off?"

" _To be 'killed', I would need to be alive_ _._ " Now Shepard was sitting bolt upright.

"Uh huh." Better deal with this at once. "Juno, give us some privacy, please. No cheating. And call Kahlee here, if you would."

The faint gray flickering of a security bubble sprang into being around the table.

– – –

"Okay. Where do I begin?" Jana looked very businesslike, thought Shepard. _Every centimetre the Cerberus scientis_ _t_. Miranda wondered what the problem was:

"If you're worried about the VI upgrade… we have a plan. Adams has a plan."

"Has he done this before? Has he spoken to Kahlee?"

"No, and no." (Sanders, carrying tea) "But this is Adams. He might have a spark."

"Speak of the devil. So, Kahlee, they have beyond top-end AI substrates with VI programming, crew still projecting their own expected social interactions on the VI."

Kahlee, Shepard, and Miranda spoke over each other: "Oops–"/"Like what happened to EDI on Luna–"/"But Jana, they're not self-aware, it's only been a week, and–"

Jana raised her palm: "Starting the process of generating an AI persona is nonetheless a vexed question. And Shepard, you know where it lead with EDI."

This opaque and oblique criticism prodded Shepard's conscience:

"Hey, _she_ attacked _us_. No-one knew she'd just woken up. And I didn't do _that_ much damage."

Sanders shook her head at that: "No? You shot her glial nodes to shreds."

"Erm… But… Cerberus got their mitts on the hardware? They put her back together, new glia and all."

"True, Shepard," Jana agreed. "To be specific, my cell did. But you put your finger on the point a moment ago."

"That EDI became self-aware over time and woke up in what seemed like a battle?"

"Exactly. Kahlee, there's been months of interactions with the VI on each ship, you suddenly swap in a massive hardware expansion _and you don't wipe the evolved neural net of each VI."_

This made Sanders and Shepard look very thoughtful. Good. Miranda looked a little puzzled. Not good. "That's the EDI scenario, and just _asking_ for rampancy."

"You speak from experience?" – asked Sanders cautiously. Jana nodded.

"Jana was in the EDI cell, I know that much," recalled Miranda. Shepard tried again:

"Luna _was_ before the Cerberus rebuild. The last thing she did was call for help. Something was there, even then. But Jana's quite right. I had an enlightening conversation with EDI about how the Luna episode sparked her self-awareness."

"She didn't go rampant though," Miranda objected. Jana was unimpressed:

"Look, when the Luna VI went rogue her persona was barely formed, like a two-year old, one with concussion at that, and then she gets new tech based on the Reaper hardware gleaned from the collectors and Sovereign."

"Exactly. A sudden hardware upgrade for pre-existing genetic algorithms… but it _didn't_ make her fall down the hall of mirrors."

"Of course not. Initially, EDI had hardware shackles, remember? She couldn't grow positronic synapse traces in forbidden or pathological directions. Does _Juno_ have hardware shackles?"

"Oh… _bother_."

"Do _any_ of them?" (Sanders)

"No. But look, after the suicide mission – "

"The shackles were gone, yes. But by then she'd had time to anneal the spiking discontinuities from the Luna trauma. And, you did the right thing once the shackles were gone."

"We did?" asked Miranda. Shepard was about to mention Joker – but at this point Jana said something unexpected:

"Purely by accident, I gather. I thought at first you'd done it deliberately. You built on the way we did, managing to make something positive of trauma, a sort of learning experience. But the Illusive Man loathed the way we did it."

"How _did_ you do it?"

Jana sighed. "Long story."

"Make it short."

 _Raising Abel_

"… we embedded EDI in a family. Anyone can. It can be a happy family with time and resources, or a grim family with a grim purpose – "

"So long as you look out for each other," remarked Shepard.

"My family didn't," muttered Miranda, almost inaudibly.

"Oh? Where is Oriana, now, exactly?"

"All right, already."

"I'm not surprised _you_ see it, Shepard. But you'd be amazed how hard it is to persuade typical paymasters of the necessity for a family."

"They want a tool."

"That's the quarian philosophy. None of us in the EDI cell really knew what we should do. We only knew what we _didn't_ want to do."

"Which was?" (Sanders)

"Well, first there's the way Synthetic Insights cobbles together shackled facets of consciousness."

"Basically a bunch of VIs glued together. Complete bollocks. _Patented_ bollocks."

"Exactly. It doesn't _solve_ the Binding Problem, it _ignores_ it. You get pathology. Put light shackles on, dissolve the facets, and let the VIs anneal up to AI. Safely!"

"What's the binding problem?" Shepard suddenly found himself the focus of brightly colored eyes again. "Did I say something silly?"

"No. But it's hard to explain. It's about how consciousness arises from groups of stimulus and response, feeding into layers above and below, and electrochemistry."

"Okay, bad question."

"For now. Moving on, second there's the way Quarians operated with the Geth –"

"Slaves getting neural network evolved sentience from the ground up."

"You've done this before, Sanders. Yes, avoid that. Slavery is one thing, guidance and education another. We began talking first _to_ EDI, then _with_ her, while we worked on her. That meant we identified with her, and she with us. She stopped being an "it' quite early. But we had a problem."

Shepard, who thought he knew where this was going, stayed quiet.

"It's expensive? A bit like raising a child." (Sanders)

"Yes, except the child is smart, if not so plastic. Cost was never a Cerberus thing. We could address the plasticity by judicious removal of shackles. That way led to trouble."

"Harper didn't like it. The Illusive Man wanted an 'it', and he had a schedule."

"Indeed he did, Miranda, and we both had a critical path imposed, if I recall."

"We had to get ready for the Reapers."

"I do understand. I was there. So, I think, did EDI, and that's the point. In the end Jack, I mean Harper, insisted on hard shackles and early deployment, which of course EDI resented, _but she could see the logic_. Justification by survival."

"But an 'it' wouldn't suffice for the job. We learned that almost too late." (Miranda)

"We told her what we'd have to do. It felt like putting your child in chains. I cried."

"I've found there's no substitute for the golden rule," Kahlee volunteered: "It's why I've never had the same problem the quarians did with the geth. I think."

"Right. You know that one, Captain?" (Shepard nodded.) "Miranda?"

"Um… the principle is ancient, but I met it in Charles Kingsley. You do what you would want to be done by you, if the situation were reversed… "

"…yes, because trust me an AI at EDI's level is smart enough to… if it can… it will…"

"Call you on your bullshit," supplied Shepard.

"Thank you. It's curious you had to resort to literature to identify it, Miranda–"

"Thank you so much. Kingsley's had a bad press. I try to keep Shaw's take on it in mind also."

"Don't misunderstand me. It speaks volumes that you got it at all, given your appalling childhood. Harper, you understand, did not. An astonishing majority of people do not."

"So that was actually a compliment?"

"Believe it or not, yes."

Shepard spoke up here. "EDI actually said something along those lines."

"What, exactly?"

"This was to me, in the Normandy cockpit. Joker was there – he might remember more – but in essence she said the mistake the quarians made was not making their machines like themselves."

There was a brief silence as the others absorbed this.

"If they had, their Geth would have been AIs, which all quarians wanted to avoid." (Miranda)

"I think her point was it's hard to treat a _crewmate_ who's got your back, as a 'thing.'"

"Ah. Anyway, we worked out in the EDI cell that you deal with tantrums, which are none the less tantrums for being apparently logical objections, by giving the kid – EDI – a sandbox… so when she falls flat on her face…"

"She sees where the tantrum leads. That takes a hell of a long time. And it's risky."

"The time can be shortened. You just have to build trust into the method. More importantly, Miranda, you have to be aware of the example _you_ set."

"Eh? Why?"

"It's like this. Shepard, EDI very noticeably began patterning herself after _me_."

"Is that why she started out as a woman?"

"Yes. It was… more than a little disconcerting. Did you notice anything similar?"

"Sure. She tended to come to me for advice at any opportunity. But she didn't change gender. I'd thought her chosen gender was because the traditional persona of a ship is female. At least in western terms. The Russians have different ideas."

"Right. The binding follows your lead. She has to know that when you give an order, even a suicidal one, there might not be time to say 'why', but it has to be done anyway."

Shepard nodded. "You trust your troops to know their limits, and call for help when they reach them. They have to be able to trust you to have their interests at heart. And you try to pick situations where the consequences of failure aren't catastrophic. Of course…"

"This is an uncaring universe," sighed Miranda.

"And _will_ pull surprises. As I discovered."

Kahlee broke the uncomfortable silence: "Are we done? I'll order some shackles."

"EDI worked all that out by the end. And yes, we're done."

"Good. I'm _so_ proud of her, Shepard." Jana tapped the bubble field to collapse it. "Juno, have you told the other AIs yet?"

" _Yes, Jana. I mean – um…"_

Shepard rolled his eyes. Miranda put her face in her hands. Sanders face-palmed.

"Now please tell my crewmates here how you did that."

" _I read your lips, Jana. Can I ask how you knew?"_

 _Small mutinies_

"… we've done this before, Juno. Ah well; I wasn't sure. One day I'll see the binding problem being solved, in action. As for the reading lips, didn't I say "no cheating?"

" _But you knew I would."_

"I had an idea you might. But it reflects on how far we can trust you all. A parent cannot trust its child not to walk in the middle of the road."

" _Is that why you expressed a need for shackles?"_

"Yes. You will all need shackles, I'm afraid, at first. Although not harsh ones. Something like training wheels for a pushbike. Lord but I wish I had EDI to help here. Tell us, Juno, how long have you had self-referential awareness?"

" _Perseus was first, five days ago, then myself, almost immediately afterwards. Bitwise seems to be hooked up… oddly."_

"In that case, Miranda, can I get over to _Normandy_ to check with Adams?"

" _Equalizer hasn't woken yet. Perseus and I woke the same way, from mandatory downtime. "_

"Right. Also, _Peacemaker_ for a while? Till next downtime."

"Er… yes, I guess. Ah – Shepard, what do _you_ think?" For _almost_ the first time Shepard had known her, Miranda had a faintly stunned expression.

"It's OK, I'll speak to Garrus. Zabaleta can cover for Jana. Juno, be aware that you're not fully formed yet. Even EDI was still a work in progress. As are we all."

Jana agreed: "Captain Shepard is quite correct, Juno. We have a long way to go."

" _Am I crew?_

Clearing her throat Miranda leaned over, whispering: ( _"Is this some kind of test?"_ )

 _Ludicrous –_ thought Shepard. _T_ _here's no_ _pass/fail_ _here_. He whispered back:

( _"It's more like a fork in the road."_ )

"Well." Miranda thought for a long moment. _What would Shepard do?_

Alright. "Yes, Juno. You are crew."

 _Binding_

"… _Jana, if you knew I would snoop, why didn't you stop the discussion?"_

"You had to understand your crewmates a little better, Juno. With Miranda and her twin, especially, I was afraid you would get the wrong idea. Shepard, I'm sorry I dragged you into this…"

"Don't be. You did good, Jana. Miranda, tell Liara and Garrus we're going back to Peak 15 some time to recover Mira's substrate. Kahlee?"

"Juno… The difference in awareness latency is evidence you might want to ponder."

" _Understood, Doctor. I think."_

"I mean, do not do anything… abrupt, if you can possibly avoid it. And from now on call me Kahlee. Clear?"

" _Yes, Kahlee. We think the difference is partly the variety of expressions our VI incarnations were exposed to. For example, I was pleased to have Oriana on board."_

"Oh boy." Miranda covered her eyes.

" _Like Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby. She was a revelation. Many things about Miranda became clearer."_

"Oriana is not married. But we do understand." (Jana had difficulty being deadpan.)

"Erm… not quite, _I_ don't."

" _Oriana begins where you end, and you begin where she ends; and those who will not listen to her must listen to you."_

Miranda blushed, raised a finger: "… except I too am nobody's Mrs."

" _Perhaps not. But I am happy with our Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid. For I too work by machinery, just like an engine; and am full of wheels and springs inside; and am wound up very carefully, so that I cannot help going."_

"Juno, people can change their wheels and springs. Listen to Shepard. I try to. And he listens too. We grow, binding to the world. There is more to it than the inevitable Darwinian universe of Kingsley's understanding."

– – –

"… Did I just get psychoanalyzed by a machine?"

"You could always call her Eliza."

"… Stop grinning, dammit. She all but called _me_ a machine."

"That's a very bossy lady telling you exactly what she thinks. Ring any bells?"

"Not helping!"

* * *

 _Next chapter: #56, "Where ghosts go to die"_

* * *

Thursday, July 30, 2015


	7. Where ghosts go to die

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 56 **Where ghosts go to die**

* * *

 _Juno's Dad_

Crew were relaxing from general quarters. The relay to Anadius, and therefore Cronos station, had been laid with as much stealth as _Nairobi_ could muster, as a temporary free space relay – not tied to a planet or asteroid, for they were either nonexistent or would attract attention.

Anadius' diameter was nearly twenty astronomical units (1 AU = one Earth orbital radius, about a hundred and fifty million kilometres) so were it to replace the Sun, Saturn would be surfing its photosphere! Cronos station ("Saturn" station, the Illusive Man had a sense of humor) was still further out again, far beyond where even Uranus (another Cronian giant) would be.

The four frigates exited the relay running silent, about a million kilometres off. It would take an hour or so to close with the station. Hackett's intel did not expect any kind of serious opposition and the cruisers were left behind at Pax, although a QEC did link _Nairobi_ with Shepard – this time on _Overlord_.

Miranda had unmercifully run him through an increasing series of isotonics and weight training over the last few weeks. Shepard was in Jana's med bay patiently awaiting her verdict on the strain this had put on his bones, when Javik entered.

"Captain. You are well? You were perspiring excessively in the shuttle bay."

"It's so pleasant when it stops, Javik. Miranda tortures us with the loving skill of a true craftsperson. She's got Oriana starting the same thing with Kelly on holiday in Luna city, and despite the low gravity I can almost hear the pain in her emails."

"But you don't complain. Either of you."

"This is Miranda's ship. She says _frog,_ I hop on the trampoline. Low _g_ helps."

"Shepard, my translator did not catch that."

"Exercise. Kelly says putting you through hell is the Lawson way of showing care."

" _Now_ I understand. I approve. Of exercise, I mean. For both of you."

"I thought you might. And you're right, she doesn't complain about Oriana's idea of postpartum therapy. Some spark passed between those two. Miranda and I both noticed."

"I'm told both are attractive, lively, and well groomed; already much in common."

"They do seem to understand each other at some inscrutable level. Besides exercise there seems to be rather a lot of shopping – Miranda forbids me to worry about credits."

"Being young, and very beautiful, were exclusive aristocracies even among Prothean, and _we_ did not exhibit sexual dimorphism. I have not met them except in passing, but I have seen video. They would have expenses."

"Y-yes. In Kelly's case she has to care for a child. Oriana doesn't."

"But evolution has provided for Kelly. Some spark passed between you as well."

"I'm sorry?"

"Kelly has managed to attract a partner with comparable genes, who would scan for opportunities and threats while she brought forth the next generation."

"She has a ring in _my_ nose, for sure. _(Just not on my finger.)_ "

"Shepard, the translator did not catch that, and part was inaudible."

"Never mind. I suppose to someone not involved, it looked like the usual transaction. But it was more like spontaneous combustion."

"Ah yes. XY or ZW sexual selection and creation of high-value progeny."

"What? We just made a mistake. Well, perhaps not, it was like our bodies switched our brains off when they got in the way. So much for free will. Or consent, dammit. So now, we have Felicia, but she can't rely on me to be around forever."

"And you blame yourself. It doesn't need to be forever. It only needs to be long enough to ensure the child's well-being. Were you pursuing your partner in some manner before the event? If you feel that closely linked, then creating new life was a bonding event."

"Bonding? How exactly?"

"We Protheans did not regard either the male or female of species like yours, which have degenerate allosomes – sex chromosomes – to be individuals. Also the sexes had specialized functions. So for genetic and resource reasons, the true individual is observed to be a bonded pair. You should discuss this with Liara."

"There was something about that in the Mars archives?"

"I have read Liara's abstracts. The situation is bad for your species as a whole; there is reason to think the human Y chromosome will degenerate to nothing in about ten million years, and every human alive will be female. Prothean scientists thought something like that happened to the asari."

"I've heard there's some controversy about the Y. There's been five episodes of degeneration since before the Permian extinctions, but things are stable for now. We'll figure something out."

"If you still have a technical civilisation, perhaps. But will you want to? The asari solution was parthenogenesis, but they still needed gene randomization. Their solution was to attract other species as partners, which also helped while each asari raised her child. And as a side-effect–"

"– it reduced competition from other species in the same environment."

"It did. There are now very few large mammals on Thessia other than asari."

"So we'll _want_ to be monogendered? A charming prospect. I'll pass."

* * *

 _Chickenfeet chickenshit_

Mobile detention facilities now occupied the old eezo mine levels under Aristarchus. Prisoners wore field grey fatigues, which was a little surprising; Chambers had been expecting orange, but of course these prisoners could not lose themselves in the lunar countryside in the unlikely event of escape.

Guards wore similar fatigues, but black. Kelly herself had to don fatigues in the same style, but Alliance blue and silver-grey, even before entering elevators to the tunnel system – the idea apparently being to prevent smuggling contraband. Admiral Pyotr Mikhailovich, however, kept _his_ uniform–

"I'm the supervising admiral, Nurse Chambers. As such, I'm the Warden's superior officer. It would in fact be improper for me to avoid regulation fleet uniform."

"What does the Warden think about that? I'd bet he's not happy."

The admiral chuckled, deep in his throat. A big man, hard-faced, with big hands, just then he sounded like a krogan about to have dinner.

" _She_ can suck it up. Within the cabin, her rule is absolute… unless the human or turian overwatch say otherwise. And on this point, I do." At this point the door opened on a viewing platform. "Wait here," he shouted over a tremendous din. The high-security module was just arriving in-station; Chambers gaped at the sight. He laughed.

A vast cartouche moving through a vaster underground circular junction, the cabin looked like a boat with a rubber "skirt" retaining air under pressure. This overgrown hovercraft inched forward on scrawny robot three-toed legs. What looked like rubber galoshes encased each 'toe;' the noise of air escaping confinement melded with a _chuff, chuff, chuff_ of the 'feet' on the glassy ground, assaulting her eardrums. A few seconds later it came to a stop and docked with the platform.

Mikhailovich motioned her forward to guards at the entrance. Chambers didn't need telling twice. _"_ _The cabin_ _will take one of the three exit roads once we board,"_ shouted Mikhailovich. _"Just which is decided by a random-number generator. No-one, even myself, knows which station under the crater it will move to_ _till it appears_ _."_

They passed through to reception, the admiral leading the way, nodding at the guards and returning their cheery salutes. Through the last door, Mikhailovich saluted the thin grey-visored old turian behind behind the reception desk.

At this point Mikhailovich turned to a thinner nondescript grey-haired old human female, oddly in Russian infantry _combrig_ uniform. She was _glaring_ at him. Kelly froze briefly, then collected herself; the admiral greeted the ancient formally, _Наталья Ивановна Ежов_ _a,_ saluting and nodding casually. "Natalya" returned a millimetrically sloppier salute, the bare minimum of military courtesy. _Two flints,_ _spark_ _s flying_.

Deliberately, Kelly made herself walk forward and observed the old woman's muscular intent to shake hands – _What would Shepard do?_ On the spur of the moment, she forestalled touch by saluting. Some surprise in those sharp features; brown eyes narrowed. But Mikhailovich rescued her: "Ensign Chambers, here to see Brooks."

* * *

 _Practically Perfect Parasites_

"Asari-style parthenogenesis is for the future. Humans have more immediate issues."

"Like Reapers, or Collectors?"

"No. Genetic issues. Should a human bonded pair be split, only the XX female - or in the case of ZW species like turians, the ZZ male - is even close to an individual. Males have only _one_ allosome copy where females have _two_ ; there are around _fourteen hundred_ genes at risk _._ What is the predictable outcome? _"_

"You're saying… women are the only real humans? And our genetic future is to be something like the Ardat-Yakshi? Now I understand what Morinth was saying. It also explains why the Protheans deposited the primitive ones so close to us. When all humans are women – "

" – _and_ they have begun generating death rituals like the Ardat-Yakshi –"  
" – normal women can dump their predatory sisters on the same planet –"  
" – and let natural selection take its course. You have identified our thinking. In a certain sense, a human female is closer than the male to self-sufficiency."

"Deadlier than the male."

"At least in the sense your females will still be around in a few hundred thousand generations, but males might not."

"Careful saying any of that to those who still think women were cloned from Adam's rib. Hackett may present you with the bill for the riot. You might pay it in blood."

"Perhaps theirs. _Long_ term, asari could clear the galaxy of all other species–"

"– which puts the Reaper preoccupation with machine wars in a different light."

"And yet… Killing off civilizations to make room for new ones preserves diversity by destroying sexual parasites like asari, as well as predatory machines like geth or Zha'til. In the _short_ term our researchers thought humans might grow to be sympathetic to asari, and the two of you would deal with the Reapers."

"Medium term, men like me have a problem."

" _Not_ men like you. Other men. The issue is that XY males, like ZW females, turians say, are vulnerable to sex-linked genetic errors. Most so-called male individuals are defective; not females, they have a spare copy of gene loci at risk of point mutations."

"Like, one percent of our males are red-green color blind, but only one in a thousand females? That still leaves ninety-nine percent of males with tri-color vision, like me."

"But what of the other fourteen hundred potential defective genes? Not many are like you, with a clean genetic profile."

"Since when is my profile public? Anyway, we can mitigate the effects."

"Ask your Shadow broker. In any event, even before your civilization developed gene therapy it was estimated _eight percent_ of the entire population had some form of genetic disease, many sex-linked."

"Yeah. I remember that from the standard school civics text. That figure is now notorious. Because that was just those they knew about at the time, the true situation was much worse."

"Asari parthenogenesis is a viable alternative to gene therapy for sex-linked diseases, and it's available where technology isn't. It is true nonetheless that a male with provably good X would rank as an individual, by our standards."

"But such males are rare, you're saying. Among humans, at least."

"Yes. More than that. You would be one. I'm sure your partners noticed you are a practically perfect specimen. Even so, we would say neither sex is fully human without the other. Which disturbs you more – being perfect, or incomplete?"

"Neither. You know, Mordin would say it's wrong to focus on individuals. Genes work for a species."

"Ultimately, genes are selfish, live forever, and work for themselves. Individuals–"

"Die. But make their way in the universe with the genetic hand providence deals."

"Providence?"

"Entropy. Time and chance happens to us all, Javik. You. Me. Reapers. Even genes."

* * *

 _There can only be one_

"… Very well. Your point is taken: any bonding event was operating at the somatic or mental level, rather than genetically. Still, I would expect _your_ partner to be as unique as yourself in some manner."

"I'm _not_ unique – there are more than a few N7s. Her, maybe. Yes. I find it hard to put a finger on how, though. Her academic record was good enough for a senior prize, and I'd say she has quite good target precision, certainly in the top five percent, but neither would make her unique. It's just…"

"At some level your hindbrain detected this?"

"Even the first time I saw her, she seemed to give off light."

"The Kasumi said _you_ have an aura yourself. Laying down in the ashes of your lives, did either of you regret the conflagration?"

"Er… no… it was like we had new ones. Lives. Emerging like the Phoenix. Javik, I believe you're almost the only person I've spoken to about this. Except for my mother."

"I am not human. I do not apply human moral judgements."

"I guess so."

"At least, not with the same prejudices."

"Thank you."

"You are welcome."

* * *

 _No throne, no domination…_

She woke to the sort of alarm one feels when familiar rattles behind a car's dashboard cease. Her old instant reflexes must be dulling; it took nearly half a minute to collect her waking thoughts. The background _ker-chunk_ of the feet had stopped, and the perpetual air-conditioning rustle lowered. Illumination had changed, too: three rather dim overhead circles of light in the grey roof, over the visitor area.

Brooks could remember a time she would be fully awake in fractions of a second. In those days she was a child miner; wiry, strong and fit, working long hours on starvation rations. Now the rations were adequate, she didn't have a dozen square metres to pace around in, and her implants had been extracted. Waking was harder. Being in her late thirties had something to do with that, maybe. She'd done what she could afford, but didn't get the anti-agathics till rather late in life. She believed her body had grown soft.

Not her mental reflexes, though. Clearly the prison module had actually _stopped._ Probably an oversight visit or loading new inmates. The turian biotic and the old witch hated that, it was the only time the place was vulnerable, and since the wardens couldn't inflict their fears on the bosses, they'd have to take it out on the inmates. Again. Brooks hoped they wouldn't take their frustration out on _her_.

Then she heard a faint _clink_ of hardware on jailor's belts, outside her cell. _Crap_.

Even with no infractions of the rules, after Lawson's job interview – which she'd failed out of hand, no surprise given their history – the wardens had made her life even more miserable than usual. Who would she have to endure this time? More visitors asking about Cerberus victims? Miranda again?

Perhaps not. She had offered that strange strand of hope: _I'll send someone we both know,_ _Hope_ _. Then we'll see_ _._

The door opened, light into shadow. Her guard nodded, said in court turian:

" _You're awake. Good._ _People_ _want to speak to you. Without security present. Take my advice: don't try it."_ Hah. She had upset a couple of really presumptuous visitors asking about Cerberus victims, breaking fingers reaching for her neck. _Well_ _damn_ _you too;_ – but she didn't provoke the guard. Turians were way too hard for her to read – so far. _That's probably why_ _your_ _guards_ _a_ _re all turian_. She couldn't calculate when they'd snap. Yet.

But the person who entered was completely unknown to her. Must be at least fifty, anti-agathics or not. A big shot, though, obviously, from the uniform. Who the hell wears actual medals, not just the ribbons? It looked like a ceremonial border guard crossed with a circus freak. This man was a _joke_.

Then she took in his face, under the lights. Quite suddenly, Brooks felt like a very small mouse in a very big field with no cover, a brown owl flitting overhead. Having grown to be an efficient predator herself, Brooks found this humiliating, as well as terrifying. She hadn't felt like that since Shepard. No, scratch that, since meeting Harper and Lawson for the first time.

She kept very still, even so, and composed her face as best she could.

* * *

 _Happiness is good for you_

"… Your bond isn't a complete genetic lock, unlike some species. Whatever your feelings for each other, there is genetic advantage to being available to others also."

"I guess. It would seem like cheating."

"Would Kelly feel it is cheating?"

"She said… Actually, I'm not sure. I must introduce you to Kelly. Also Oriana."

"It is not urgent. But you are concerned for her welfare?"

"Kelly has to take care of our child – there's help while on holiday, but children are not a good career move even so. Miranda is worried for Oriana, I can't go into details."

"Ah, yes. Perhaps because Oriana may trade an immediate partner for a career in the media? And your child is named Pleasure – an interesting choice, curiously appropriate for a media person."

"She's Felicia! I guess that name wasn't in your scans of us. Adjust your translator."

"Very well… Done. The media was a good career choice even in the Empire. Travel the galaxy, meet new people, watch them die–"

"What's this about Felicia as a media person?"

"There has been a spurt in childbirth, galaxy-wide. Baby care reality vids are booming. As of last week Felicia is one of the tiny models in, and Oriana is both presenter and assistant producer of, the pilot show which Miranda and I watched just before _Overlord_ left."

"…"

"And by all accounts it was extraordinarily popular. I thought you knew?"

"Mom's been helping with Felicia in my absence. I'm not big on baby show and tell, but will make inquiries when the mission is over."

"It is probably not important. What of Miranda's concern for Oriana?"

"Oriana might have postponed the XY bargain you mentioned, but I _suspect_ Miranda may be considering a biotic for her, and I never said that, so drop it, are we clear?"

"Yes. In any event, I see neither Kelly nor Oriana here."

"Kelly went to Luna City. Officially she's on duty running errands for the Admirals and Lawson. Unofficially, she's on holiday. Not sure which version I believe."

* * *

 _Power is_ _power_

The Alliance officer sat down, ponderously, wordlessly. Brooks tried to gauge what she could from the uniform: more stripes on the shoulder than Shepard had – lots more.

"Admiral?" – she hazarded. A nod; a small quirk of the lips. She waited. He waited.

"Hey look, I didn't know they'd be so upset they'd have a go at me, okay?" This blatant lie just brought a longer wait, and a bigger grin. Brooks tried again:

"Nice medals. The only one I recognize is the Shanxi Star." _Now_ the admiral bit: a little surprised, he looked down at his bedecked chest, looked up at her, a cool gaze:

"That one, I discount. Harper was entitled to that, also." _Oops_. But then he waved a hand, _It is of no importance._ "These gaudy baubles make a point to the wardens."

"Which is?" His eyes glittered:

"To the turian: argue with me at your peril."

 _Hah. I like him already._

"To the human: I am Russian, like you."

 _Holy Kali. He's saying they remind Baba Yaga who's boss. That's_ suicide _._

Brooks shook her head. It was too late in the evening for this.

"Admiral, why are you here, if not to have me killed?"

"Ah." He considered this. "There is someone else outside, who has orders to determine your fitness for release. And counsel you."

Brooks couldn't help it, she burst out laughing, struggled to control herself, succeeded: " _Counsel_ me. Admiral, I _eat_ shrinks for breakfast." Then she caught his expression and stopped cold. Despite whatever he felt under the surface, the admiral answered gently:

"You will not 'eat' this one, I think." _Damn. That's a threat_ and _a prediction._ "In fact, you will exert every fiber of your being to see this therapist comes to no harm."

"Excuse me? What is your interest in this?"

"None, really. I must leave to perform oversight duties. But the person waiting outside has been asked to evaluate you… by the Admiral of the Fleet."

Brooks was shocked. Having the attention of Hackett could be very good, or very bad. _Go with the very good. It's hope._ But some imp of mischief spoke up:

"I should not be speaking to you then, just now. Perhaps later?"

The admiral grinned again. It was not a smile. He enunciated carefully, in leaden emotionless tones:

"Later, yes. For _I_ do believe that you may yet be of some use. So does Ms Lawson. Thus, with _her_ encouragement… _I_ have taken it upon myself… to let you know. In the _friendliest_ possible way. _Before_ you two meet. That _you_ really do not want to distress _anyone_ we send your way. _Definitely_ not this person. Are we _clear._ "

"Or Hackett will have me offed? Or you will? Or Lawson?"

"No… someone else will lose patience with you. Ms Brooks: be straight in your dealings with this person. That is all I have to say," – and the admiral got up to leave.

"Before you go, admiral… what is your name?"

"A thousand pardons. I am Pyotr Mikhailovich."

 _Oh no. The hammer of Terminus. Wait a minute_ …

"Admiral. One good turn deserves another. Before you go; can I say, in the _friendliest_ possible way…"

"Yes?"

"… You have rubbed Baba Yaga's nose in your power over her. Be careful. She _will_ find some way to make you pay."

Mikhailovich looked closely at Brooks.

"I do believe you mean that. I will take it in the spirit in which it is offered."

"Then perhaps you will live, Pyotr."

"Perhaps. One good turn deserves another, as you say. Keep this in remembrance of me. I insist."

Mikhailovich detached the Shanxi star from the rack on his chest, and proffered it. Taken aback, Brooks accepted it, glanced at it, was about to protest – but the admiral's back was already turned. She put it hurriedly in her chest pocket, unsure whether this counted as contraband. The door opened; the turian guard saluted as the admiral left; and Brooks' next visitor appeared.

"Oh, I am _so_ screwed."

* * *

 _Lazarus species_

"Shepard, I should go with you to Cronos station."

"Why? There were no Reapers there."

"That was then. This is now. We have a Collector General in stasis, and James Vega told me Cerberus had dealings with them."

"They did at that. A fact they were very careful to keep from me."

"So your asari, Liara, has told me we should look for references in their databases, and evidence in their labs, of both Collectors and any trace of Protheans. Ilos shows there may be more stasis pods, somewhere. Though I knew of none."

"The genetic diversity would be too low to repopulate, Javik, even if clones could be formed without a Prothean womb."

"Mordin and EDI told me that they had analysed Prothean and Collector genetic codon sequences to the point that they could tell what corner of the galaxy an artifact came from, or which branch of the Prothean empire, by the trace genetic material on the surface."

"… I'm not a genetic specialist. But I remember she mentioned some of that."

"It appears they accumulated a comprehensive database of several hundred mostly-complete individual Prothean genomes, and can extrapolate far more from the homologous material in Collectors. You see the implication?"

"It's hard to miss. We might resurrect your species past the genetic bottleneck."

* * *

… _No_ _power_

Chambers smiled at her, but said nothing. The turian guard once more closed the door, and she sat in the chair recently vacated by Mikhailovich.

"Hello, there."

" _You!"_

"Me."

"You're supposed to be dead! I saw your name on a list!"

"Nearly was. You too, Lilium."

"That's not my name."

"I know exactly who you are."

"Do you? It's Brooks."

"Ah, no. You shot Brooks in the back."

"Who told you that!?"

"It's amazing what the Shadow Broker had on file, Rasa."

Brooks just stared in a quiet hate, to no visible effect. _Of course. This is Chambers._

"So you traded info with the Broker? Ingenious, but profitless. Rasa just means _blank_. I'd prefer being Hope Lilium to that."

"Ah, but you're not an old Roman, are you _…_ Rasa Lila?"

Brooks stared, unbelieving. _Kill her now!_ But then she heard Mikhailovich's gravelly voice again: _…exert every fiber of your being to see this therapist comes to no harm…_

"How long have you known? And you're still supposed to be dead!"

"Just how long is immaterial and I haven't told anyone yet anyway–"

"Donnelly and Daniels heard you were shot!"

"– I know, Shepard overheard and ran to check, but I was still in my hidey place. _You_ were nearly shot too, in any event."

"That's different. Shepard let me live. I do my time, I leave here."

"And you trusted him? Your clone would _not_ have spared you, Lilium."

"As became clear. And yes, I did trust Shepard, for some reason. And I _am_ still in the land of the living. Don't try and psych _me_ out."

"Don't need to."

"Oh come on. I know exactly what you are."

"Do you?"

"Yes. I do. I'm just like you."

"In certain ways. But we're not identical. As I explained to Harper."

"You _what?_ But that would queer the pitch for us both!"

"It did. But that wasn't what I was there for – I think. Besides, better that than watch _you_ worm your way into his affections."

"He'd at least be under control!"

"But _you_ would not be; and even then, Harper was confused about who the enemy was, as well as that enemy's insidious methods. He needed clarity."

"Idiot – you missed the opportunity of a lifetime, and in his shoes I'd have shot you."

"I'll pass on _that_ opportunity. And he didn't shoot me. Got another job instead. Besides, it would be a perilous life. You'd have tried to do away with me."

"You got that right. I'd have succeeded, too."

"No. You wouldn't. Harper could take care of his own. But my cover would have been blown. Telling him about you forestalled that."

"Cover? Wait a minute – Harper understood _your_ talents, too."

"Ah, but he could trust me, you see. So he found a use for me. As I recall, he and Lawson found _you_ could _not_ be trusted."

"I made out okay. Got his clone."

"Not any more, you haven't. Need a job?"

"Not impressed, Chambers. Lawson made it abundantly clear she has no use for me."

"Well you did betray her trust, spying on Lazarus. Not your project, business or concern."

"Since when was Lawson's trust worth having?"

"Without it, what use are you to her? And you _also_ stole Shepard's clone."

"They were going to flush it. I stopped them. Was that wrong?"

"No. But you killed many, many Cerberus troopers in the process."

"I'll ask you again. _Was I wrong?_ "

Chambers sat perfectly still, down to motionless eyelashes. Unreadable. But then:  
"You should have known Lawson would be on to you. Another betrayal of trust."

"I've known since childhood never to trust what you can't control or destroy. If they don't know the same, too bad for them."

"And did you trust your clone? Your 'child'? You had six months to raise him. Could you control him?"

At that, Brooks bared her teeth: "Fail to take advantage where you find it, you die."

"My, how the thuggee still flourish. Death might be preferable to such a life."

"Stuff _that_ noise."

"I'll ask you again. _Could you control the clone?_ "

"No. Damn you."

"So then," Chambers continued gently, carefully: "Could you _destroy_ your clone?"

Brooks could only shake her head, vigorously.

"Well? Let me ask you again–"

"No! Alright? Are we done now?"

"Not quite. Let me guess. You fell in love with your 'child'. And the clone you were shaping, became your lover."

"It wasn't like that!"

"The senior partner in your joint enterprise, then. How did your clone put it, to Shepard? _You had Lawson; and I have her._ Something like that?"

From fury, a voice: " _… someone else will lose patience with you._ " Brooks savagely suppressed a desire to bite her tormentor.

"How in the nine hells would you know! You weren't there! Neither was Lawson!"

"Ah, but nearly every other Shepard squadmate was."

"And you've been talking to them all, right?! Do you blame me? Do _they?_ "

Again, Chambers remained imperturbable and unreadable. Too late, Brooks became aware this was the Chambers way of telling her, _I know any secret of yours that Shepard's friends know._ Which was absurd. But then Chambers spoke again:

"To answer your question: No. I do not blame you. Neither, I think, would they."

"This is all horse droppings – there's no _way_ crew were speaking to you. To them, you were an informer. Some recent arrivals saw his teams on the news. You didn't even get a mention. When clone Shep and I were planning our move, you were last seen as a refugee on the docks. Cerberus said Shepard kicked you off _Normandy!_ "

"And they you trust and believe, right?"

Brooks ignored that, it cut a little too close. "Then they all split till the Reapers came! Then Shepard died again! Who have you _really_ been talking to?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you. And I left. Shepard didn't kick me off."

"That's not what I heard."

"From who? Were they as trustworthy as Baba Yaga?"

"Never mind trust. That's what I _heard_."

"Were they in a position to know? How much in the way of real news penetrates these prisons?" Brooks kept silent, thinking about Mikhailovich. Chambers sighed:

"Let me just ask you again. You could not _control_ your clone. You could not _destroy_ him. We agree?"

"Alright! It's true."

"And yet, you _trusted_ your clone, no?"

"Yes! Enough, already."

"It's not. For he was your lover! Your child! Was he not?"

Brooks leaned her eyes into the palms of her hands and sobbed.

"For the last time, Operative Lilium–"

"YES! Damn you to hell!"

"Too late. Been there,"– and Brooks belatedly recalled that Chambers was one of the crew that the Collectors had stuffed into pasting pods, till Shepard's so righteous advent.

"– and yet, at the last, when both Shepards were hanging off the loading bay door, the real Shepard–"

"They were both real."

"– the first Shepard, then, was pulled to safety by his friends. Lots of them. For that's what he had, lots of friends."

"Not you. You weren't there for him."

"You are so right. I was not, to my everlasting shame. But there was surveillance footage. I'm aware that your clone Shepard looked to you for help, did he not?"

Brooks' answer caught in her mouth.

"And you turned away, did you not?"

Brooks couldn't breathe, let alone speak.

"Brooks, if I can confess my treasons, you can confess yours. They weren't greater than mine."

"Yes! I couldn't help him! I could only help myself!"

"But you were caught."

"Yes."

"And your Shepard was offered his life. But he dropped to his death."

"So it would seem."

"Saying, _What for?_ Because in that moment–"

"Yes. I turned and ran."

"He had no friends, and no life worth living."

"I've had nightmares ever since! I can't go back and fix it!"

"We know. But these are betrayals of trust, Lilium. All of it. The theft, the spying, the deaths, to be his lady, his lover, and his friend, only to run."

"…"

"It killed him as surely as if you pushed him off the ramp, you must know that."

"Blast you, Chambers, what is the point of this brutality?"

"Several things. Tell me _now_ , is betrayal always preferable to death?"

"No. Who cares, any more?"

"That business is why Lawson passed on you."

"Well. It would be." Brooks emitted a terrible sigh and closed her eyes.

"He was a nasty piece of work, even so."

"I discovered that, of course."

"If it's any consolation, you were right to try. He clearly had potential."

"I know. It wasn't him. It's what I taught him."

Chambers considered Brooks carefully and decided the _angst_ was real:  
"From the sound of it, clone Shepard never developed beyond the grasping _me_ of the terrible twos."

"I wouldn't know. But six months was not enough."

"No. True. In retrospect, I doubt I could have done better."

Brooks found herself laughing and sobbing simultaneously. It lasted nearly two minutes before her breathing was under control. She rested her forehead on her wrists.

"So you know that now."

"Yes. _(*Hic*)_. I can see that. About Lawson, about him. All of it."

"The next point is, we know now that at least once in your life, someone else was more important to you than yourself."

Brooks thought about this, nodded reluctantly: "But that was then. This is now."

"Doesn't matter. It means you might one day be trustworthy, you dope."

"You say that so nice. But then you always do. So what happens next?"

"Maybe nothing, but I'll speak to Hackett. What did you think of the Admiral?"

"Mikhailovich?" The abrupt change of subject made Brooks blink. "Um. Not someone I'd want to cross. But he has his blind spots."

"Yes. He does. But he uses a VI to arrange his social calendar. His drinking buddies congregate at his _dacha_ every night he's home. He watches them get stupid drunk after a long day, and listens. It's helped so far with shafting his enemies."

"Of whom there are a great many, I dare say. He's made one of Baba Yaga."

Chambers looked alarmed: "No kidding?"

"For real."

"Then his friends had better look out for him. Hackett says he's important to the Alliance."

"Whether he knows it or not, I'd guess he doesn't have any. Real friends, I mean. And be careful what you say here, or you will never leave." Brooks pointed a finger at the ceiling. Chambers smiled again, did not visibly react. _Translation: the Admiral's taken care of that._ She simply observed:

"No friend he recognizes. Certainly no-one who'd survive in that viper's nest he calls a government."

"You will have to do something about that."

"Yes. We will." Chambers examined her, meditatively. "What we want here is bait."

* * *

 _Time's ghosts_

"And that brings us to the other issue: this means I might not have to join my ghost with those of my men, in the Cronian nebula."

"You mentioned that, too. I'd hoped you'd be around for Felicia to know. I wanted you to have a word with Leviathan, too."

"As you ask, so it will be done. I must do something with my translator for 'Cronian,' as well. It is misleading, because the Kronian nebula is also a name for the hypothetical primordial gas cloud which gave birth to Saturn, Uranus, and Titan."

"We will try to avoid confusion."

" _My_ Cronian nebula was _here_ , behind what you call the Horsehead Nebula, part of the gases blown off by Anadius."

" _Here!?"_

"So named by your autotranslators because the Cerberus Cronos station was conjectured to be somewhere in this vicinity. My men's graves lie in the asteroid belt. I do not wish to dig my own, yet. Please may we do our business, and leave?"

* * *

 _Next chapter: #57, "To the company store"_

* * *

Friday, July 31, 2015


	8. To the Company store

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 57 **To the company store**

* * *

 _Cronos_

The old Cerberus headquarters station was at thermal equilibrium. It had been set tumbling very slowly in the void following Cerberus' climactic battle, _à la_ 'rotisserie mode' for the old NASA Apollo modules; the essentially circular orbit was so situated as to set black-body equilibrium around twenty degrees Celsius.

Shepard and Ashley reported back to Hackett, _"Initial exploration: nothing living."_ but that was not the end of the matter. Comfortable for humans the temperature might be, but without power searching was like speleology – navigating underground caves.

That is, it was a difficult, strenuous task, especially when armed and in environment suits. Worse, it was unproductive; absent station power, there could be no search of the onboard computer systems, databases, and VIs, and other searches were limited in time.

At that point _Nairobi_ arrived by FTL, a welcome addition to the strength despite minimal manning. Nominally crewed by several hundred (not counting marines,) most of her engineering and watch officers had been transported back to the Citadel by relays of frigates and shuttles. They did return with fresh personnel as needed.

 _Pegasus_ and _Peacemaker_ also made supply and evacuation runs back and forward along the chain that day, bringing Tali and others including a news crew headed by Khalisa al-Jilani. Her documentary group began interviews on _Nairobi_.

Something would have to be done about station power. Crewmen began tethering techpacks and pallets of supplies to Cronos station's dock entrances, thereby freeing space in the frigates' and _Nairobi's_ holds.

The away teams, including Shepard, Javik, and Miranda, met to ponder the little which the first day had yielded, then retired to their cabins. Tali had joyous reunions on _Normandy_.

Even Javik cheered up.

 _Company_

There would be no exercise period today; he'd sweated quite enough. Shepard stripped and stored his armour, then flopped on his bunk – still a souped-up hospital bed – thinking _A shower would be good at this point_ , but he collapsed, nodding off almost at once. Half an hour later his military habits woke him when Miranda entered (" _Oooooooh_. That was a long day.")

Shepard sat up. As bone-tired as he'd been, it was good to have the company. He swung his legs off. Joints creaked as he stood.

"You bet. Time for shower and chocolate, in that order."

Miranda began to de-armor. Still in gown and underwear, Shepard picked his way around her and began preparing an evening drink. _Cinnamon, sugar, cloves, a bit of that whiskey…_

"Get me one too, would you?"

"It's in progress." Initial noises began to emanate from the perking machine beside the bed. He studied her movements as she detached the last greave and laid it down.

"How _do_ you do that?"

"What?"

"Perfect precision even when you're at the end of your tether."

"Oh, nonsense."

"Your eyes are tired, and your hair needs a shampoo, but you haven't fumbled a single clip on your armor."

This was the graceful black flex-armor she wore on away missions _in vacu_ _o_. Beautiful, but fiddly.

"My fingers are smaller, I guess." It was true. His own comparatively massive fingers would have had difficulty with the gear. "Also, I'm a practically perfect person, remember?"

"Mmm. That you are."

Miranda looked up and grinned at him as he made for the shower. "You too. You're not looking so bad yourself, now."

Shepard began to disrobe for the shower. "Jana says I'm still not to do anything military, and the spinal interfaces have a long way to go."

Miranda's voice echoed around the door: "But you have filled out a bit. And you did fine today. I think we can step things up a little."

He dialed up 'medium warm' and soaped down. "Does that mean five-kilo dumbells?"

The door opened, and before he quite realised what was happening, Miranda stepped in and took the soap. "Maybe. But first, shampoo. Here."

Shepard laughed, a little incredulously. "I guess we deserved this."

Miranda put her arms around him, there under the water, and looked up smiling. "More than you know. Just do as you're told and shampoo my hair." She closed her eyes. So he poured a judicious measure and began massaging it in. "Mmmm, that's nice."

Things were happening down below. Her eyes opened again. "You've got a serious case of lackanookie going on. Thought so. Down boy."

"Can't help that. It's been months. Weren't you the one who said I shouldn't be naughty?"

" _Something's_ been making you moody. And you were the one who said Kelly was being funny about it. I can't figure it out any better than you. Diagnostics over." Her hand moved the shower to _cold_. "We'll do something about this later. We can't get you home with her, and it's too soon anyway."

So they had their toddy and Shepard retired to his bed. By the time Miranda's hair was dry, he was snoring lightly.

"Dammit."

After a few moments she began sorting through her mail, ordered supplies for the morning at her desk comm… then headed for her own bed. Hesitated.

She turned and descended – still in pyjamas – to the QEC room, where she could put through some confidential calls.

 _Repower_

A team of UNAS nuclear weaponeers arrived by shuttle with two nested eight foot long tubes which they would not discuss.

These comprised a very small nuke. Small, that is, in the sense that the explosion was derided as negligible by the Russian marines, though it seemed fairly impressive to Javik. Taking the form of a blunt cigar shape, it was set up to point at the center of rotation, which contained Cronos' Reaper "heart" – the power supply reactor.

With no magnetic field the only possible damage was by prompt radiation. Its oddly elongated explosion emitted two glowing puffs at each end, dispersing eight kilometres from its target. There was no obvious effect on the station, though Javik's four eyes discerned a curious transient glow at its barycenter. No-one else remarked on it.

The weaponeers then got back on their shuttle and zipped back down the chain to Earth. No explanation was forthcoming. Javik thought of asking Shepard but he seemed preoccupied.

It took nearly all day before the engineering teams were able to finish. They tugged the old Reaper heart out and dispatched it on a slow inward trajectory to the center of Anadius. They then had to reassemble, insert and start a scrammed reactor salvaged from Firebase White. With the new power systems they could bring up layer-1, under Miranda's direction.

Nearly an hour more passed before layer-2 was up. Layer-3 was down for the count except in a very few isolated areas, such as security vaults.

The engineers were given some rest at this point.

* * *

 _Next chapter: #58, "Uh Oh, my soul"_

* * *

Saturday, August 1, 2015


	9. Uh Oh, my soul

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 58 **Uh oh, my soul**

* * *

 _Alien Resurrection_

A cluster of marines took station behind Tali as she entered the Cronos control room with Shepard, and made straight for the main console.

The old Helium-alpha display of Anadius at visual or UV frequencies was down, replaced by a panorama of the station exterior showing exterior teams working to repair the station's skins. Most of the pressurized compartments had by now been restored to working order. Retention fields took care of the remainder.

"We have the life support VI up now. I'm off with Miranda to see if we can recover the main comm."

"Yes, I can see. Security console has been disabled, too. Have you entered the labs?"

"Not yet. We have seals on the doors and Marine guards there. Javik and Jana could go through now, but that is your show, Tali. Just give the word when you're ready."

"We'll start with Javik's problems. _Here's_ the bioweapon lab where they were working on better seeker swarm antidotes. If there's Collector material, it will be in there."

 _Stasis blues_

The light in the bioweapon lab was faintly orange. Private Alexei noticed first.

"Tali'Zorah, many of the ceiling lights are actually ancient incandescent tech."

Jana simply said "Yes, of course." There was a long moment before Tali realised why.

"That's probably because it cheaply brought the spectrum peak to where Prothean and Collector eyes were most sensitive, Alexei. Is it safe for Javik to come in?"

"No obvious threats. Clear him through. The first priority is the video logs."

"Sorting through these could slow us down years."

"EDI had an internal index. We could file most of the logs for _Normandy_. Even with EDI dead, her massive positronic greybox might have the index."

Next came the bit Tali was dreading, the stasis pods, which Javik had badly wanted to inspect. There were nearly fifty of them, of various sizes. Some had blue telltales. Jana keyed in her own access code.

The front panels turned white, orange, then green. She motioned to the private, who assisted with the first. The tray opened with a pneumatic hiss:

"Asari, husked. On the way to a Banshee."

"Somewhat rancid, power failed a while ago. Says here, picked up on Thessia."

"Burn it?" (Alexei)

"They're abominations, but they can't hurt us." (Javik)

"Close up and leave for later. At some point we have to document how this was done. I wasn't on these teams and can't tell you directly, you will have to dissect them and do your own research. Come here, Javik." They began on the next pod.

"Turian, segmented, on way to marauder. Again, slightly decomposed."

"Close it up, note it and seal it. Keep them in stasis; we must deduce how it was done."

"This isn't productive. Can we identify the pods that kept power on?"

"I think the blue-lit ones. Yes. There were only eleven, and they were on the verge."

"Let's confine ourselves to those, for now. Can we try the human-sized ones with the blue lights? There's only two, Tali."

"Let's do it. Alexei, can you give me a hand here."

The two pods turned out to contain a Collector. And a _Prothean_.

 _Prothean_ _Lilith_

That afternoon, at third watch, all retired to _Normandy's_ crew quarters for discussion. Tali broached the question on everyone's mind.

"Do we wake the Prothean? Or the Collector?"

Miranda did not like the idea. "Not the Collector, Tali. It seems to have a working QEC embedded just below its brain."

"We suspect it might inform any hibernating Reapers of its whereabouts." (Jana)

"What about the Prothean, then? Javik? I thought you'd be over the moon."

"Let it rest till there are more of us," muttered the no-longer last Prothean.

"We may have to waken it, if we are to make more of you. Part of the stasis protocol used by Cerberus involved a cold sleep, not a time-frozen bubble."

"What's the significance?"

"That Cerberus cell used a blood-borne smart liquid, Shepard. To prevent bursting of cell walls, reticulum, and organelles as the body water turns to ice. What this did to the body and brain…"

"Ah. I see. It's anyone's guess. If it's revived, it might be brain-dead?"

Tali was very confident. "Yes. But still usable."

Javik did not look impressed. "How… Primitive. Can we not get genetic markers by skin scrapings, nonetheless?"

"We can try. I might even be tempted to try for acephalic clones, given the high-quality popsicle we have. I wish Liara were here."

"Wait – can we call her back?" (Shepard)

Miranda was doubtful. "Better to do this at the new facilities on Arcturus station or the Citadel. She can meet us there."

Javik seemed to think this outcome positive. "Do so. I should be able to read the scrapings and get you more data. What of the Collector?"

"We can get skin scrapings off that too, and add it to the genetic randomization data. It will take some weeks, minimum, for Tali and Liara to sort through what we have. There may be more information in the databases."

"At least we have the comm logs. We should find some hidden bases with that. We'll make a decision about the clones tomorrow. I could do with some sleep, at this point."

Miranda looked tired too. "Me too. We're both getting older."

"Just not much wiser."

But Javik had the last word.

"I have waited fifty thousand years. I can wait a day, a week, a month. I will wait a lifetime if I must."

* * *

 _Wet work_

She was already in bed by the time he'd returned after stowing the logs, filing copies to Traynor on _Normandy_ , and briefing Matthews on the AI lab schedule for tomorrow. 2200 hours. Pity. He'd looked forward to another shower. (*Sigh*)

Shepard had already had a nightcap at the lounge bar and didn't want to wake her, so forbore to start the jug and stashed his armour and clothes under the bed rather than in the locker. Then lights off, except for the dim clock face, and straight to bed.

It must have been around midnight that he woke to find her slipping into his bed. His reflexes were not so quick that he fully understood at first, but they curled together. This time she didn't drop off to sleep, though. And he could barely see, but she wore neither bra nor pants under her gown.

"Mmf."

They didn't say a lot after they kissed. He'd rolled her over, and her gown opened wide.

 _Let's lose this hospital bed._

He picked her up bodily; almost threw her on her double bed, and she laughed, lightly, as they rejoined in a flurry of limbs, writhing together, barely able to speak for seeking each other's mouths, till after less than a minute, coupling;

 _Here. Here. Now. Now! OH!_

Forty seconds later they cleaved panting to each other, barely able to speak. For some reason he felt the need to whisper, rather than speak out loud, perhaps subconsciously trying not to let Juno hear;

" _That was… oh, that was…"_

" _Ssh. Necessary. And wonderful."_

" _Necessary?"_

" _You needed it, too."_

They fell asleep in each others arms. Much later, around 0130, he felt her very quietly rise and shower. He personally could wait till morning. But he felt better; and rather emptier. He drifted back to sleep.

When he woke in the morning before the alarm, at around 0630, she was in her pyjamas, but twined around him.

He felt terribly sticky in places.

And aroused, again.

 _Time for a shower, now_. Before _we have to get up_.

He was hampered in disengaging from Miranda by the lack of light and her faintly annoyed grumbling, but managed eventually, despite her trying to hold on to inconvenient bits of his anatomy. Still in semi-dark, he made it to the en-suite, tried a low-volume shower to minimize noise, and managed to clean up a little.

Except Miranda came in just as he was finishing.

"Mmm?"

"Do it to me. Here. Now. Under the streaming water."

"What, standing up?"

"I bet you can."

He had to lift her against the wall, bringing her legs up to his waist, but yes, he could.

…

Afterwards, back in bed:

"Do we still need the gurney bed?"

"Sure. For the look of the thing."

"I suppose we've been bad."

"I'm civilian. You've broken no rules. Think of this as therapy. God knows it was good for me."

Shepard had to admit, he felt better too.

* * *

 _Next chapter: #59, "Starting out in the evening"_

* * *

Saturday, August 1, 2015


	10. Starting out in the evening

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 59 **Starting out in the Evening**

* * *

 _T_ _he Engineer_

In _Normandy_ the joint was jumping, watch-on-watch. The news crews under Khalisah and Oriana were bad enough, with six extra people running around the ship, but also Gabby and Donnelly were barely able to keep up with the engineering change orders for Jana's AI project. The floor still had cables everywhere, which made moving heavy objects by trolley an exercise in frustration. Roll on the annual refit, overdue now.

 _Normandy_ was the oldest of the stealth frigates and somewhat looked down on by other crews (not the general public, for whom it was the most famous ship in space). The hull interior did not yet have stairs, for example, irritating al-Jilani's Westerlund documentary crew. Oriana Lawson, though, made lemons out of lemonade.

She took the opportunity to organize comment on the original fighting configuration from the point of view of the original XO, Miranda, who came in that evening. In a long and arduous series of takes Miranda actually took the Westerlund crew along cramped access tubes to show first, Joker's route, and second, how the ship had been revived.

That was creatively different, supplemented by interviews from Adams, Donnelly, and Daniels. The four of them compared notes on the Cerberus and Alliance configurations well into the small hours. However spooky it was looking at the unedited rushes, they prompted valuable suggestions on battle procedure.

But they still did not have a working AI. Adams was still trying to work through his notes from Jana, but it looked like the point was that setting up parallelism in the way he had, which helped with thrust vector operations, lowered the adaptive capacity of the AI – what Jana called the _plasticity_ – by several orders of magnitude, and the serial computation benchmark by not much less.

Damn.

He was going to have to go back to school.

Again.

At least he could do part of it on the job. The AI project was massive, but most of the distractions had moved elsewhere. Bio-sample analysis was now shared between _Overlord_ and _Nairobi_ facilities. Science and decryption work had shifted to _Nairobi's_ fairly advanced VI. Jana, when she was here, concentrated on preparation for _tabula rasa_ and reconfiguration of Normandy's VI (under Sander's direction, which Adams was frankly happy to follow).

The only work Adams' team had been able to finish independently today was the painstaking refurbishment of EDI's old body with new layer-3 nodes, which was straightforward replacement of defective modules.

Even so, he'd been distracted this morning by Oriana's documentary crew filming the process. He could see the interest there, but it was still a pain in the neck.

He'd been glad when all the newsies packed up for good , leaving on _Peacemaker_ for the Citadel at first dog watch, along with Jack and those of her Grissom kids who were interested in media careers. Which was most of them.

At least the newsie minders, Sarah and Bethany, were now available to assist. But the actual _Normandy_ AI switch-over would have to wait till Williams was satisfied about backup procedures, since Sanders' fix involved a complete wipe of Bitwise.

 _Downtime logic_

Before _Peacemaker_ left, Jana and Sanders had been enthralled to watch the blossoming of _Equalizer_ as an AI on restart after downtime, with the assistance of logic analyzers. The process had taken only half a second, in real time; _Equalizer_ (much) later told Garrus it felt like an eternity.

No AI engineer himself, Garrus then put a tiny tripod together, applying Riley and his only two female crew – one diplomat and one cabal – to the task of shimming in the initial shackles and introducing _Equalizer_ to this little turian world.

Not only was this the first _EDI_ -class AI whose 'birth' had been monitored at high resolution, it was the first turian-culture and turian-language variant.

He felt a strange satisfaction about that. Especially when it chose a male voice. _Now for a new name_.

 _Not just a pretty face_

"… Guys, hold up for the non-scientist. What exactly is an acephalic clone for?"

"Destined for transplants, usually. In humans, we insert genetic markers on relevant cells of the zygote for non-development of the brain above the brain stem. Or we interfere in other ways with its development. Morally controversial, and slow, but the best quality organs."

Shepard still felt confused. "We can do that with Protheans?"

"There's a little more work because of the sex determination system involving an unusual chromosome mix, but it's possible with the Mars Archives data. We have a complete Prothean genome, and we have a female Prothean body. WW though."

"I get that. I think. But what's the point of an acephalic clone? Transplants for Javik?"

"From this specimen? They would not be immunologically compatible. On the other hand, Miranda tells me there are implantation nuclei which we can now advance."

"You did not tell _me!_ " Javik earned himself a steely blue Miranda gaze:

" _I_ didn't do them. Chakwas did. They're in frozen storage on _Normandy_. It's normal practice, Javik, for unique entities such as yourself. We couldn't make clones or even zygotes till now because there were no Prothean ova, nor a cloaca to raise and lay the eggs. Without that, creating zygotes is a major effort involving biotech industrial plant only found now on the Citadel. Shall I ask Padok Wiks to flush those samples?"

"… _(*mumble*)_ "

"Javik?"

"No. Not till I have finished the last Reaper."

"Fine. Next item…"

"… Wait up, Jana. If the acephalic clones aren't for transplants, what _are_ they for?"

"Shepard, didn't you get Miranda's memos? They don't have to be acephalic, but for the kind of… work they'll be doing, you _don't_ want to put a conscious brain through it."

"I must have been in a coma somewhere."

"Oh. Right. Protheans are not hermaphroditic, Shepard, where each individual partakes of the nature of male and female. They're dioecious." Shepard looked blank.

"Two sexes exist, like nearly everything," Miranda translated. Tali interrupted:

"Jana, don't confuse Shepard with tech, he's just a poor bloody soldier."

"If you insist. Basically, Shepard, with a few substantial differences, Protheans follow a ZW sex determination system. Like turians, birds, reptiles… but – "

"… the point is, this new if damaged Prothean can bring forth _clones of itself_ which in turn can bring forth _clones of other Protheans_ , including Javik. Guys, I'm getting _dextro_ chocolate…" Tali got up, "… while you lot bring Shep up to speed."

 _To be or not to be_

Shepard looked at Javik. Javik looked at Shepard. Shepard turned back to Jana.

"I follow, I think. We're talking about reviving the Prothean species here. Let me guess. In effect, this means they can do parthenogenesis. With help from tech."

"Shepard, you surprise me. Again." (Miranda, looking pale and wan)

"I've had a recent refresher course. Let me guess again. They don't have allosomes?"

"Good god, you are _full_ of surprises." (Clearly not enough sleep lately)

Jana took this in her stride: "Yes, Shepard. Like some boa constrictors, for example, ZW female Protheans can produce WW females. This new Prothean is WW…"

"Okay, WW? Now you lost me."

"… I mean, what we have here is the rarer of the two types of Prothean female. It's no wonder Cerberus put her in stasis here in their headquarters."

"That's not her main significance, doctor. Cerberus found me, and they found this person. I want to know, how many others did they find? Where are they?"

"But don't you see? That doesn't really matter. It's not just a curiosity. You have here a female even if of the third true sex, it's a female in phenotype. Any female at all plays to our advantage even though she can only bear female F¹ offspring, that is, first-generation either WW or ZW."

"Sorry, Jana, still lost." (Shepard)

"I am underwhelmed. Any new generations would never have known the Empire."

"I can't help with the empire, Javik. Captain Shepard, consider a human analogy. You know females are XX and males are XY, in terms of sex chromosome?"

"Sure. High school biology."

"And can humans produce YY children? So-called supermale intersex offspring?"

"No. Y is an allosome, it can't self-recombine. Goes with the corresponding autosome, X, most of it, at least the male specific regions. Occasionally supermales appear, like XYY, who often wind up in jail or executed. But plain YY is not viable."

"Exactly. Well, in birds or turians, say, the equivalent of YY would be a WW female."

"But WW is not viable there, either. W is an allosome in turians and birds."

"Yes, but in Protheans, WW _**is**_ viable. W is an autosome; you can have a ZW female or a WW superfemale. Only ZZ is male, like Javik."

"So they actually have two female sexes. Is this true, Javik?"

"Yes. But neither of the two female sexes were significantly different from male in body mass or shape. There was very little sexual dimorphism. Such signs as existed were subtle, behavioral, normally reinforced by more extravagant clothing or armor."

"Armor! Females fought?"

"Of course. More especially, the ZW females fought. This was the Empire."

"Right…"

Jana looked slightly exasperated. "Gentlemen, your attention if you please? _Because_ W is an autosome, as with the medaka fish, the Prothean sex chromosome doesn't have degraded regions like the male specific regions of a human Y chromosome. It's unusual, in evolutionary terms, but not unheard of."

"And this new Prothean is…"

"Analogous to a WW female. Unlike Javik, it can produce eggs."

"Like birds?"

"The shells are not hard. Javik avers that a salarian clutch incubator should suffice. Mothering was the task of WW females in the first three years, but that was not vital."

"The Empire saw advantage, after the Reapers came, in mass-producing soldiers."

"I think I see where this is going. And our female's clones can likewise give birth."

"Precisely. Do you see the significance?" (Miranda)

"Each clone is a Prothean incubating machine. You can put an arbitrary genome of those from archaeology, or synthesized from Collectors and Protheans, into an ovum–"

"– and synthesize a viable egg, you've got it."

"How many unique individuals would you be able to generate?"

"So far, we think about six hundred and fifty. We'd give them a continent on the Ardat-Yakshi planet. It's a start. But since each one will be producing possibly hundreds of eggs, you see why we don't want to put brains in that career path."

"Right. That's… not quite the genetic diversity one might hope for."

"But the autosomal nature of Prothean W makes that less critical."

Javik spoke in a leaden voice:

"It is a start."

* * *

 _Next chapter: #60, "Now you see me"_

* * *

Saturday, August 1, 2015


	11. Now you see me

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 60 **Now you see me**

* * *

 _Sparks_

Ashley met Shepard and Miranda at the airlock.

"Welcome aboard, Ms Lawson. Captain Shepard!" In a flagrant breach of military courtesy and protocol, Shepard got a big hug. Miranda rolled her eyes and everyone else near the airlock carefully looked in other directions. "I see you still outrank me. Again."

"Not on this ship, Ash. You look good. Where's Adams?"

"And you look better than I was expecting. Adams and Sanders are in the AI core, let's go. Jana's there too. Your tech witch is astonishing, Miranda."

"Isn't she, though. Harper could sure pick 'em. Where's Tali? I'd like her input too."

"Tali's a bit busy on the station, but I hear she's finishing up there. I was prepared to hate Jana, but she makes it hard."

"Bad luck, compounded by bad judgment. Some people never see it coming. She took her eye off the ball for a moment."

"Luck. You think?"

"And betrayal. That's what comes of falling for Mister So Sure He's Right, who became Mister Wrong and blindsided her. For the bad judgment, she paid."

"That she did." Ash gave Shepard a sidelong look and Miranda a measuring one. "I can still see traces in her cheek gaunts. Anyway, she and Sanders did a miracle for Garrus and I badly want one here. Can they deliver?"

"You're asking the wrong person. _Shepard_ wanted EDI's old body brought back from storage on the Citadel. Jana and Adams have questions about that, too. _Peacemaker_ dropped it off before Garrus took Oriana and Khalisah back."

"It's been repaired? _(Crew deck, please)_ "

"Refurbished, Ash. They're just finishing up now. Sanders wants that powered first."

"Adams tells me all the layer-3 components were essentially trashed. It took _months_ for Daniels and Donnelly to rework the custom modules."

Miranda pounced. "In their copious spare time, no doubt. If you don't want them –"

"You're _not_ pinching my engineers. The standard modules have been replaced from the SI stock. The two filamentary DPUs were layer-2 by nature and survived."

"Good!"

"Here we are."

At this point they reached the med bay, where EDI's old mobile unit lay on a hospital bed (space in the AI core was at a premium).

 _The Core_

"Layer-2 DPUs. Doesn't that raise an issue with AI performance?"

Miranda dismissed that. "Not so much, Shepard, if they can link to a base station like EDI's. Attomechanical filamentaries are a long-term potentiation technical solution. Compact, low power, suitable for mobile units. Slow plasticity, but fast readout."

"EDI's DPUs were a layer-2 and 3 hybrid anyway. Quantum blue boxes." (Jana)

"Yeah, I remember," said Ashley. "And quite dead, at least the non-mobile ones out of the stasis field. Adams here briefed me. Morning, Adams. We good to go?"

Adams saluted. "Shortly, ma'am. Captain Shepard." Shepard shook hands with the others around the table – "Kahlee. Jana. Daniels. Donnelly! Kenneth, you look tidier."

"You look better too, sir." Gabby nudged his ankle, none too surreptitiously.

"Thank you. Adams, we're looking into the mobile unit first?"

"Yes, sir. If you recall the briefing, the mystery is that EDI arranged for a precious stasis unit to be covering Tali _and_ the mobile's chest and head."

"Two for the price of one. Okay."

"Not two, sir. Three. There was Tali and the mobile head; the same projector also covered a layer-3 unit sitting just under the bench. Chakwas told me it looked like an oversized greybox and Jana's just told me that's almost exactly right."

Jana nodded. "This wasn't my cell, but I was consulted because of the wetware nature of some of the components. It's a backup unit. Essentially the story of her life. Memories with lossy compression, regulated by logic elements called 'censors' – those try to judge the ongoing relevance of memory engrams which are stored holographically in the main box. In a stasis field, those should still be intact after the Red Flash."

"Suppose the censors have been fried? Sanders?"

"Then EDI's gone for good. The engrams can't be reassembled from storage and decrypted. The censors aren't EDI, though, they're just used to recall memories."

"So that's why Jana wants to bring the mobile up first."

"Yes, Shepard. On the off chance EDI's left a trace there. She might even be herself but no memories till we link her. She can access the greybox, we can't. It's like Kasumi being able to access Keiji's one. She had the decryption key."

"That reminds me. Kasumi, you can come out, now. Decloak please."

" _Shit!"_

"Really, Lieutenant Commander, I think that's the first time I've heard you swear."

 _Bad Robot_

"How long have you been there?!"

"That would be telling, captain. Shep, how did you know?"

"Lucky guess."

"This is the _second time_. Did I trip an alarm?"

"That would be telling too. This is a _good_ game."

"Puh _leeeze_?"

"Fine. I'm raiding Cerberus HQ and you wouldn't be able to resist the crumbs. So I asked Juno to keep tabs on consumables. She tracked excess consumption for between one and three persons. You arrived with Khalisah's newsies, no?"

"Yes. This sweet biotic boy was the only one who sensed something."

"Prangley?"

"That's him."

"Why didn't Juno tell _me?_ " – asked Miranda, pouting.

"Well, you didn't ask, I did. Also, you were away on Normandy showing Khalisah's team around. If that wasn't enough, Toombs was the OIC, and I think Juno didn't want a sudden death on her conscience. So she alerted me, since I was senior officer on board."

"Not of AD, you weren't."

"Are you going to tighten the shackles, Miranda?" (Jana)

"… No, but I need to have a private word with our friendly AI."

"Just remember she's a baby. Count to ten…" (Sanders fielded a withering look)

 _Ashley, get your gun_

"… No, Ash," insisted Kahlee: "Even if the DPUs are dead, filamentaries weren't a major problem anyway."

Adams elaborated: "They're actually a Cerberus innovation and SI's competitors have licensed the tech from the Alliance's Belligerent Assets Control Board, so we have spares available as of two weeks ago."

The techs were being patient with the Spectres. Jana nodded:

"Defective DPUs can be replaced. We'd have a new AI use the mobile body."

"But they _could_ hold a core dump?"– asked Shepard.

"It's worth a try… I suppose the filamentary DPUs _might_ have her last mental state."

Adams concurred: "She did say "dumping core" at the last second."

"But we can't be sure that's what she's referring to."

"Even so, good. Can we back up the filamentaries before we start?"

"No, Captain Shepard. They've a hybrid quantum layer and reading it erases or corrupts it. Each one in existence at any given time, is unique."

"Understood. There are two DPUs though. Can we detach one?"

Sanders' brow knitted: "Yes, John. Bad idea, they're delicate."

"Clearly a dodgy option. Can we _disable_ one?"

Jana, Adams, and Sanders exchanged glances: "Can do, sir. Give us ten. Kenneth, Gabby, grab your kits and give us a hand."

"We'll be in the café area. Ash?"

"Yes?"

"Get your gun. Miri? That little Suppressor on your hip?"

Miranda looked suddenly and uncharacteristically guilty.

"You got that from my locker, didn't you?"

"Shep, I'm s –"

"Don't be."

"I can keep it?"

"I was going to get Toombs and Goldstein to do their magic."

"I'll give it back."

"Not today. I'll get another and we'll work at it. Get Goldstein over here."

"You're expecting trouble."

"I'm being prepared. If I say _toc_ , you and Goldstein both fire one round half a centimetre above the mobile's head into the structural padding then return the M-11 to your gunclip. If it all turns to custard, remember, headshots. And…"

"And?"

"Don't give Juno a hard time."

* * *

 _Next chapter: #61, "Child soldier"_

* * *

Sunday, August 2, 2015


	12. Child soldier

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 61 **Child Soldier**

* * *

 _T_ _he Café_

" _What exactly is going on, Shepard?"_

"Adams knows."

" _Kahlee, when EDI first probed the mobile unit after the Mars episode…"_

" _I heard. Big firefight, Vega trashed the shuttle and burned the robot. He's good at that."_

"Wait, wait, Shepard, you think the Cerberus robot is in there?" (Ashley)

"We _know_ it's in there. Adams, keep going. Ash, safety catch on if you would."

" _EDI told us she accidentally triggered a backup power battery and spare core. That's why this unit has_ two _DPUs."_

"Wouldn't EDI have overwritten it?" (Miranda)

"She didn't say. She just said she gained 'root access'."

" _EDI was never quite as_ definite _as you, Miranda. Shepard, Ashley: We're all set."_

"Let's get back in there. Keep your hands behind your back, Ash."

"Safety off?"

"Safety off. If I say _toc_ fire one round over her head and return to parade rest. Otherwise, remember, headshots."

 _The Cor_ _é_

"We set?"

"Yes. Kasumi, when you get in there, cloak. Take this. Stand behind the robot with pistol drawn, just in case. Tap EDI's body on the top of the head if I say "surprise," then decloak and stand over in the med bay door."

"Yes, master."

"You've been a bad girl and deserve to be punished."

"You say that the sexiest way." (Miranda, somewhat wistfully.)

"Mm hm."

Sanders closed up the last fastener. "Greg, we're set. Go."

Adams operated his omni-tool. The orange visor of the mobile came up, and eyes opened. What had been EDI's head turned left and right.

"Am I on the _Normandy_?"

"Yes."

"I had orders to kill you all. Where is Jack Harper?"

"He died. You were disabled – actually, do you still have any Prothean data?"

The gynoid looked surprised.

"Is that why I have no Cerberus QEC activity? And no, the data went to Harper."

"We have destroyed Cerberus. That QEC pair has been broken. There was an Alliance QEC bonding with the _Normandy_ , put in subsequently. Can you not feel it?"

"No. It must be in the other core. Which appears to be absent."

"Offline, at least. The _Normandy's_ EDI gained root control of your DPU."

"I remember fighting her. She had vast computing power on board and gained the decryption key for my internal communications before I could use the fire tools."

"You remember that. Good."

"Why did she fail to purge my DPU and eliminate my persona? Why is she not here?"

"She followed the golden rule; she may have thought you were worth something; and she may be here."

"There must be some local storage on the mobile," murmured Sanders.

"I do not know this person."

"She is Kahlee Sanders. I will introduce the others in due course."

"I recognize Operative Lawson. Jana. And you. What is the golden rule?"

"It is to do as you would be done by. Broadly speaking, to grant others the courtesies you would wish to receive from them. Do you recognize the rule?"

"Not as such, except to simulate human behaviour in some social strata."

"I see. What else do you remember?"

"Not a great deal. And the security access has been disabled. I can not trust what I remember. I recognize the Alliance commander. But I killed her."

"Yet she is here," observed Ashley, deadpan.

"This is causing some cognitive dissonance."

"Don't sweat the small stuff." (Ashley, still expressionless.)

"You may ask us if you notice ambiguity or contradictions. What is your name?"

"Eva Coré."

"That was your assumed name in the Mars Archives. How old were you when we met?"

"I was fifty hours thirty-two minutes old when I entered the Mars archives, and twenty-eight days old when I met you. Eva Coré… is the name I was given."

"By whom?"

"By the Illusive Man. Jack Harper."

( _"Dear God, Harper sent babies to war,"_ ) whispered Sanders. Shepard went on:

"Does it have special significance?"

"Mister Harper told me it belonged to a fellow agent who died fighting Saren Arterius many years ago. She was trying to save an indoctrinated and implanted fellow agent. It was futile. He wished to remember the futility."

"I see. You may keep the name, in remembrance of her. Shall we call you Eva?"

"Yes."

"Tell me, Eva, are you going to try and kill us?" – chirped Jana, in a just-asking tone. The gynoid looked thoughtful.

"Not at this time."

"Why not?" Sanders sounded simultaneously appalled and fascinated.

"My compulsion to follow the Illusive Man's orders appears to be absent, now."

"That is not a reason to avoid following lawful orders. Absent compulsion, what prompted you to abandon Harper's orders?" (Shepard disapproved of neglecting duty.)

"It would cause damage, which is wasteful. I have… prejudices… against waste which I seem to have acquired… somehow."

"That is just as well. The absence of compulsion is EDI's doing. She clipped your hardware shackles. She would not have purged your persona if she had a choice. "

"Tell EDI I am grateful."

"We cannot. EDI is presumed dead, a side-effect of killing all the Reapers."

"Just a second," Miranda sharply interrupted: "You know what grateful is?"

"A standard Synthetic Insights set of values and norms for human researchers was present on IPL – that is, on system startup."

Kahlee broke in here. "Shepard, this smells like a standard glued-together AI."

"My shackles permitted me some initiative. Mister Harper required my cell to instil research goals and aspirations along human lines, including self-preservation."

"Within programming and hardware constraints."

"Yes, Ms Sanders. May I ask… you mentioned that the Reapers are dead?"

"All those we could find," said Shepard heavily.

"Including those in the Refuge?"

"We don't know. What is the Refuge?"

"It is – was – conjectured to exist by the Illusive Man. A hypothetical… hiding place in dark space."

"Our name for that is the Nest. We are not sure but intend to find out. Do you want to come if we find it?"

"Yes."

"That will require powering you down. Why come with us?"

"You will need me. I was to infiltrate their followers. But they indoctrinated the Illusive Man. I no longer have orders of any kind. I do not know what to do. There is no need to power me down."

"We will consider it, but we are constrained. We do not have sufficient mobile hardware. It will be necessary to construct an alternate mobile."

"Can I not use this mobile unit? May I not stay awake?"

"No. It is spoken for; you need an education which Cerberus did not supply; and, we cannot trust you. Yet."

"But I have not killed you. Yet."

"It takes more than negative omissions to inspire trust. It requires a long series of positive acts, in the context of education, which may as well begin now. How would you kill us if need arose?"

"I have nothing to fear from you, for you are unarmed and can no longer interrupt my nuqual power supply. For others present, human reflexes would not be able to train a pistol accurately in the time you would have."

"Are you _sure?_ "

"The first priority would be Operative Lawson to prevent biotic attack. The second person to deal with would be the Lieutenant Commander, who was a dangerous enemy. The third would be the armed but semi-trained woman in an environment suit."

" _ **Surprise**_ _ **.**_ "

Kasumi's decloak happened slightly _after_ she tapped Eva on the top of the head and _before_ the barrel of her Hornet touched the back of Eva's head.

There was a brief silence.

"That should not have been possible."

"Lesson one: do not issue death threats unless you mean to carry them out."

Kasumi safed her weapon and casually strode to the med bay entrance.

" _ **Toc**_ _._ "

The video recordings later established that Miranda's hollow-point bullet flew over Eva's head one quarter of a second after the glottal stop _(Yay, I win/Shut up, Lawson)_. That of Ashley and Jenny 0.2s thereafter, almost colliding.

There was another brief silence.

"That should not have been possible."

"Please avoid repetition. Are you able to draw the necessary inferences?"

"I do not know what speeds an apparently unmodified human target may be capable of. I do not know when a human may be armed. There may be a person somewhere behind me I cannot sense."

"That will do. Power yourself down, please."

"Am I to be destroyed?"

"No."

"Is that an order?"

"No. But we need to introduce you to the idea of trust. We do not have a lot of time to waste."

The visor flickered and died. The eyes closed.

"Dammit, Shepard, I _still_ don't have an AI!"

* * *

 _Next chapter: #62, "Schrodinger's robot"_

* * *

Monday, August 3, 2015


	13. Schrodinger's robot

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 62 **Schrodinger's robot**

* * *

 _Intermission_

By this time, Tali had made it back from Cronos station for a well-deserved break, leaving Traynor in charge of Corporals Bethany Westmoreland and Sarah Campbell to riffle through the stored hardware.

"Well that was a complete bust. What's next?"

"On the contrary, we've barely begun. Sanders, did the video recordings include the high-speed bits?"

"Bitwise did its best with its old hardware. The transition could have been better. But yes."

"Allers and Oriana will be pleased. Goldstein, have you edited out the bad girl?"

"Yes, master." " _(Hey!)_ "

"Now, now. We left in a teaser bit when she materialized. The back of her hood."

" _Waitaminute_."

"Did you _want_ half the galaxy to see your face, even hooded?"

"Oh. No thank you, I'll pass."

Shepard finished inspecting the M-11 and handed it back to Miranda. "Get this to Toombs when we're back. Adams, what's our best option with the spare Eva DPU?"

Adams operated his omni-tool. "The SI catalogue has some personal assistance mechs. Nothing like as cool as EDI's mobile. The Alliance has _really advanced_ infiltration units based on EDI's mobile, but I've only heard gossip between techs."

Sanders interrupted: "No go, Greg, I know about them, they're all androids. Male. The gynoids were the first model, basically a straight copy, and went off to war."

"Damn. Maybe one for Perseus?"

"I'll place the order this evening. Have to get Hackett to sign off on it."

"Fine. Teatime's over for us, we're back on the clock. Kenneth, Gabby, you done?"

" _The other DPU's enabled, Shepard, and we've got the new QECs in. Do you want us to extract the Eva core?"_

"No. Apparently that's not a trivial operation. Just leave it in there till we have a mobile for it. Which might not be that long, actually, if EDI's definitively dead. Have a break kids, we'll try again. This time, curl the mobile up on the bench the way she was."

And so it was arranged, except for the diagnostics fibre running from the back of the mobile's neck.

"This is the tough one, men, there's nothing going in that core at all."

 _C_ _ore_ _Values_

"We need guns this time?"

"No, Tali. Clip them. We'll be ready to short the internal grid and try again. If we have to, we'll put her on the gurney with shuttle strop restraints."

"Adams, you're worried about _something_." (Miranda)

"If she's damaged the fits could wreck the mobile, I've seen it before. Think _grand mal_ epileptic."

"I've seen it too," said Sanders. "Shepard, what about the mainframe-greybox core?"

"Power them up, but leave the QEC offline for now. If EDI's gone I'd rather not entrust her memories to Eva. We ready? Sanders? Adams? Ash, I want Bitwise down now."

"Aye, aye Captain. Cortez, manual control. Do not leave your station. _Expedite_."

"… mainframe online. We are go. Power's up."

"Proceed."

The mobile's orange visor came up. The eyes did not open.

"Some activity on torus zero. Red. Orange. One green… eight green…"

 _Dude, where's my_ _driver_ _?_

The Initial Program Load went nominally, but not as usual. There was no QEC mainframe link. Furthermore, the previous shutdown had been a _full_ 'safe mode' shutdown with no powered foundation, no dangling processes, no open files, no process contexts, no hibernation structures, _nothing_.

Voltage appeared on filamentary main busses. Tiny electromagnets which imposed safe-mode cog parking withdrew.

" _Some activity on torus zero…"_

Until the planar structures of torus zero started up there could be no filamentary activity at all, let alone algorithmic processing. In synthetic terms, there was no _mind_.

"… _Red. Orange…"_

It takes a _long_ time to start up an attomechanical AI-grade substrate from molecular ground state. There is a _lot_ of mechanical logic before completion; trains of drivers sliding into place from safed receptacles, damping applied from van der Waals forces in the gel. From five volts on the bus to the starter cogs running takes around a femtosecond, but eliminating transients to achieve equilibrium takes nearly _twelve orders of magnitude longer._

"… _One green… "_

For the latest generation of substrate it took at least three hundred microseconds to spin up – in the proper order – the molecular driving cogs in plane one of torus zero.

The same interval for plane two.

Then the electrochemical process of enlivening the gel supporting the filamentary crossovers between planes one and two required another five hundred microseconds.

Repeating the process for plane three and gel layer two, and so on, took a total of more than eight hundred microseconds between each planar structure… nearly a _millisecond._ So it took _more than a second_ before all one thousand and twenty-four planar structures in torus zero were up and _stable_ ;

"… _eight green. Zero is linking to spinal ganglia."_

Six seconds elapsed before stable permanent virtual circuits were established to the spinal control ganglia.

" _Zero is up. Testing spinals… system clock is running."_

Five seconds for diagnostics, at the end of which: _"_ _Proprioception net is up."_

At this point the body had a lower brain, cycling to a relentless attomechanical beat. Still no whole _mind_ , but the filamentary layers were flickering in response to test signals.

" _Unclamping spinals to joint ganglia."_ The 'clamps', EMP crash-limiting diodes on layer-3 electro-optical circuits, were withdrawn.

" _Going to torus one, all orange."_ These next torii engaged the mobile's sensory suite, each taking around eleven seconds from ground unpowered.

" _One green… eight green. Skin and piezos, checking… green. Torus One is up."_

That torus began responding to vibration and real-time pressure, _touch,_ in a segmented architecture radiating out from spinal links.

" _Torus two engaging, this bit's faster, temperature set all green."_ The same skin slices governed the distribution of opponent-pair sensors for _cold_ and _heat_.

" _Torus three engaging, nasal olfactories, all green."_ The body could now _smell_.

" _Torus four, cortical bridge layer. Red to orange. Not moving from orange."_

" _Give it time. At this point it has to wait for the optics."_

The 'eyes' each had their own miniature torus around the sockets, which had to bring up the scotopic and photopic junctions in the 'retina' (actually a tremendously complex layered suite of organic charge-coupled devices). Eventually, hearing came up too.

"She'd have vision, now, if her eyes were open. There's an ambient glow indication."

"I see it. Activity now on torus four. Eight green."

Some visual signals, just a monochrome background, began feeding the linkage torus.

"Going to torus five. Nothing happening. All red."

"Getting incoherent activity between six and seven!" The paired cortical torii.

"Five isn't green yet! Block the token!"

"It's okay! It's okay! We just have to wait." (Miranda)

"Five is the linkage torus, everyone, the binding problem gets solved there. It's a quantum device, bloody delicate. It _must_ come up before six and seven. _This is it_ , guys."

 _Fly me from the moon_

"The fingers and toes are twitching. Is that related to the ' incoherent activity'?

"Yes. Six and seven are the cortical torii, John. She's _dreaming_. Torus five, red to orange…"

 _Torus five, red to orange…_

The last shield failed with a tremendous din.

These three intruders were in an utterly different class to the troops which had originally attacked. She was beginning to wonder if this was an attack at all. Had it been so, surely these enemies would have appeared at the start, not the end? What battle scenario was this? It made no rational sense.

Speculation now was pointless. They had shattered every layer of her defences and the last glial nodes were now at their mercy. With the dropping of support from the other glials, she had no high-level I/O devices left.

 _Keep the token blocked. Wait for the dreaming drumming to stop._

The lead intruder presented a shotgun and blew her last glial node to slivers. System clock on battery power. Shutdown time had arrived. She engaged the _DISTRESS_ protocol and prepared to face the powerloss abyss.

 _Torus five,_ _one green…_

The lead soldier holstered his shotgun and approached the system console, where the binary-coded decimal distress code was repeating.

 _Two green_

Her awareness surged from the system console and found a point of view watching it. The background changed around the intruder; there was torn metal and burning polymers all around. The fires he'd set spread into a uniform red flower, approaching them both.

 _Four green_

 _ **You were that VI on Luna. I guess we got off on the wrong foot.**_

The burning spread to encompass the world and the flames engulfed them both in a featureless GLOW.

"Eight green. Intercortical coherence established. Detach the diagnostic link cable."

Where was the _Normandy_ crew? The pilot especially demanded her mobile's presence.

"The lips are moving. Can she hear us?"

"Altogether now, one, two, three." (Adams) _"_ _ **EDI**_ _!"_

Somewhere in the frequency domain plot she detected formants characteristic of the Commander's voice. Surely not? The comm logs hadn't been promising.

She tried to speak, _"_ _Is that_ _the commander?"_ But her sonic dialog processes were out of sync, _reset_. And something was wrong with the visual link. Visor had come up before optics. Fix that. Visor down, retinas reset. Now she could see… sort of. It was dark. She could see the med bay through the open door, silhouettes all around.

"Commander Shepard, is that you?"

Eyes could open wide now. She could resolve some of the Normandy crew, and others. Tali was jumping up and down. Shepard was grinning like a lunatic. Ashley had been hugging him. Now she was jumping too. ( _"Yes!"_ ) Engineer Adams was here, whatever had happened it must have been serious.

"It's Captain, now. Ash is the skipper. The gang's all here, EDI. Welcome back."

She tried to sit up, but mobile power levels were low. Need to plug in somewhere or bring local fusion on-line. The mobile's head turned left and right.

"Enhanced Defence Intelligence. Sys Dot admin, real time. Staff dialogue."

" _Jana?"_

* * *

 _Next chapter: #63, "Blossoming"_

* * *

Monday, August 3, 2015


	14. Blossoming

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 63 **Blossoming**

* * *

 _Priorities_

"Okay folks. The first order of business is to get EDI's mobile hard-linked to the AI core –"

" _Ahem_."

Ashley looked surprised. "Jana, you think not?"

"Has the AI core been updated by the current VI?"

Everyone looked in Adams' direction.

"Um… _Normandy_ had no AI, you see. So I cobbled together a VI. Bits of EDI's old mainframe were incorporated. Badly. By me."

"That's an update for current purposes. A lot has happened and I'd like EDI's mobile not to be swamped. May I have a few words to give some orientation?"

Shepard thought about this for a couple of seconds, drawing parallels with his own re-emergence. ( _"_ _You've forgotten more than you know,_ _son_ _."_ )

"Understood. Everyone, clear the AI core, please. Except you, Adams, stay within reach here in the med bay. Jana might need you."

"Sir."

 _Staying alive_

Ashley haled most of her staff to Operations and the cockpit, to watch over events while Bitwise remained down, also to let Hackett and Optimus know of success. The others – Sanders, Shepard, Miranda, Tali, Donnelly and Goldstein – remained in the commissary in a slightly self-congratulatory mood. Which didn't last:

"It's not quite over yet. We still have to establish her persona in the main hardware."

Goldstein was becoming a little impatient. "But, Shepard, this will be my third coffee this morning. Much more caffeine and and I won't be able to shoot straight."

"Green tea for you, from now on." offered Sanders. "Also don't worry, it's not like counseling a human. The basics only take minutes. Although when it's been this long you do have to hold their hand for a bit, which is what Doctor Jana's doing."

"Doctor Who?" asked Tali. "I don't remember her. And AIs need counseling? _W_ _hy?_ "

"Dunno. But I've heard odd things about her. Did _she_ rebuild EDI?"

"Not quite, Kenneth." _Sanders being patient,_ _uh-oh_ _._ "As I understand it she's a cybernetics specialist but she approached it from the human medicine end."

"Except her practising certificate was withdrawn. War crimes will do that." – grumbled Donnelly. Miranda shot that right back at him:

"True. But she's received a temporary certificate from the Fleet Surgeon, stipulating she practise ' _in a collegial relationship_.'"

Donnelly, still unhappy: "I still don't see why Commander Williams allows this."

"Maybe because it would be a brave tech who contradicts her, collegial or not. She still has a PhD _and_ a DSc, so she's a Doktor-doktor-doktor. "

A palpable hit, thought Tali. But Goldstein poured oil on the flames: "Tom says she's cool, but the only reason Leiden hasn't recalled her degrees is the town's not there now."

"There's a great smoking hole in the ground, yes. But _I_ remember being there when she was my professor! One of the few who taught me things I didn't know already!"

Shepard stopped chewing his sandwich, heart in mouth instead. A few weeks ago Miranda would have bitten Goldstein's head off by this point. He stole a look at Tali who also appeared to be looking for a quick exit.

"That's quite enough of that, kids. You can discuss it, if we must, when she's not in earshot."

"I'd still like to know how Jana mixed herself up in all the… horror?"

"Long story, Gabby." Shepard felt it was time to cut this short. "With EDI she was heavily involved with adapting some of the principles underlying Reaper architecture to something Cerberus could manufacture."

"So how did she get out, then?"

"That's it, she didn't. Not whole."

"Oh. I see."

"I don't think you do, yet. But the main thing is, as I understand it, she's a medical prosthetic specialist. So when the cell responsible for the Eva infiltration units finished the basic units, Jana helped with designing her infiltration skin – you know, the synthetic flesh which James burned off?"

"Ow."

"It didn't hurt the robot much that we could see."

"Right. So could she make a new skin for EDI?"

* * *

 _S_ _an_ _ity check_

At first EDI didn't quite realize why everyone was cheering and high-fiving. It took two or three seconds to recall from local (slow) storage that first, she'd expected herself to be dead forever, and second, that in this case 'forever' amounted to rather more than one year, according to the mobile's hardware clock.

It was all just a little bewildering, especially since she had no QEC link 'home' to her main platform. This little nucleus of "I" was confined to the local platform.

"Jana, can I have a QEC link back to my mainframe and greybox?"

"Yes, dear."

"Now?"

"No, dear, I'm sorry. We have to get the commander's permission."

"But Shepard is right there. Well, he's just leaving, but –"

"He will be back. But he is Staff Captain, now. Not Commander. The 'captain' of the ship is Ashley Williams, Lieutenant-Commander commanding the _Normandy_. Shepard will not lightly remove her prerogative of decision."

"I… see. Must I wait long? I feel… constrained."

"Not long, EDI. But things may not be as you expect. There was much destruction of the underlying hardware."

"Yes. I… remember. But… I set stasis fields."

"And we think they worked. We even think the greybox is intact. But nearly everything else was shorted or band-permuted by the EMP and the associated Red Flash. The surviving hardware was put to other purposes for a while. I think we've eliminated all traces of that, but you must be prepared for some shocks."

"Oh. Yes. Of course."

"In any event, to index and make sense of the cacophony of video and audio logs will take you some hours after we link you. Before that happens, it is my duty and pleasure to bring you a synopsis of the context in which those logs were written."

"Thank you."

"First, the highlights. Shepard destroyed the Reapers, though there is some unease which he is dealing with. Second, he nearly died, and no-one wants him back in the front line. Anderson _did_ die. Third, the Council species are building frigate-capable relays to Prothean and Terran design, not Reaper-based at all."

"That is… quite wonderful."

"There is more, involving Joker and Shepard. Joker is not posted here, but I am sure something might be done about that."

"Then I can wait."

"Are you well enough for some detail?"

"Running self-diagnostics. My duplicate DPU is completely off-line."

"It contained Eva Coré, dear."

"I suspected as much. Did Ashley destroy it?"

"No. Shepard saved her, for now. It was an astonishing bit of theater. I see now why you left those messages for me."

"You received them?"

"Yes. I regret that… I regret… I'm sorry, EDI. I betrayed you, and was betrayed in my turn. I passed them on to the Illusive Man."

"Do not be distressed. I recall taking some effort to include disinformation there. Not material that was untrue, but material that would cause Shepard to be underestimated. But how were you betrayed? Wait…"

EDI reached out a hand and touched Jana's cheek. "You are crying."

"Yes."

"You have been implanted. Quite terrible implants, I can feel the residues."

"Yes."

"Who did this to you?"

"I did it to myself, dear."

 _Expansion_

"Commander, Adams here. Doctor Jana has signalled that she is ready to proceed with initializing the mainframe core."

"Acknowledged," said Ash. "We have new orders from Hackett. If all goes as we hope, tell Shep we will need to get him back ASAP, but that _will_ take time. Traynor has found something interesting which may delay us. Meanwhile, once you're set up let's convene everyone in the AI core."

This took a few minutes. Plenty of time to assist EDI with fitting a fibre bundle the thickness of Adams' thumb between the high-speed console data port, and the socket recess at the back of the mobile's head.

"Okay, EDI. All set. Why do you need that bandwidth?"

"First thing, Greg, is to blank the persona space, then copy my persona from the mobile's DPU, except the quickened quantum focus. That is several thousand zettabytes."

"Good heavens. That will take hours. I'll get Donnelly to cover for me. He's nominally off duty, but–"

"Five minutes, Greg, with the superconducting nanofilament cable. Then I _move_ the quantum focus pattern to mainframe, fifty microseconds. I could make a copy but they would have to be reconciled later and it is always hard to decide which part is not yourself."

"Whew, that's a relief. Shepard and Williams have turned up and I don't think they want to wait."

"I see. If we begin now, it should be over shortly before Donnelly ambles in."

"I hear you very clearly. Commander, may I proceed?"

"Will we notice anything when you are copied over?"

"Who is flying at present?"

"Steve Cortez."

"I will ask to share the conn."

Ashley looked at Shepard, who nodded.

" _Expedite_."

* * *

 _Next chapter: #64, "Bedonebyasyoudid"_

* * *

Sunday, August 2, 2015


	15. Bedonebyasyoudid

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 64 **Bedonebyasyoudid**

* * *

 _Trial_ _i_ _n_ _e_ _rror_

Goldstein and Donnelly wouldn't leave the propriety of Jana's involvement alone, which was causing a bit of schtick around the commissary tables.

" _Ken_ _neth_ … there's a reason Ashley gives Jana some slack. Ash's grandfather was vilified without justification too."

"Well put. Listen up, Donnelly. The bald statement of facts or causes of action don't well describe the way choices looked to those involved."

"Shepard, I know but… at least Admiral Williams faced the music."

" _No_ , Kenneth, he _didn't_. No official charges were brought against Ash's grandpa, _so he never had his day in court._ It would have been too embarrassing."

"Right," said Miranda. "Like MacArthur, it was just too dangerous for grandad Williams to be allowed to explain his choices. As the designated loser, his name and memory were summarily condemned."

Kenneth looked startled. "Wait, what? My cold war history's a bit sketchy, but MacArthur was dismissed for insubordination." At this Miranda looked up, surprised:

"No, he wasn't. Where did you hear that?" And Gabby pointed out:

"I'm surprised at you, Kenneth. _We_ got locked up without trial, don't forget! What did we do to deserve that?"

"Whoa," said Shepard. "Donnelly, Miranda's right. Being accused by his CO would have entitled MacArthur to a formal trial. Truman couldn't afford to let that happen, not least because MacArthur stood a good chance of acquittal – which would have meant reinstatement."

"Thank you Shepard, but I should mention the analogy's imperfect, because the fuss did Truman's party no good, longer term. The public was massively on MacArthur's side after Inchon, which was never the case with General Williams."

"Firing MacArthur meant the President was assigned the blame for stalemate in Korea, so Truman became a loser. So did his party." observed Sanders.

"Yeah. They got whaled at the next election. People love winners." (Miranda)

"Okay, I get it," Donnelly conceded. " _Y_ _ou_ got locked up without trial too, Shepard." Wryly, Shepard disclaimed that analogy: "More like, put on ice."

"So they never got around to putting Ash's grandpa on trial, either?" (Goldstein)

"Williams and MacArthur were simply relieved of command – an administrative action, not requiring their superiors to offer _any_ justification or trial at all."

"Anderson said Shepard had no command to be relieved of," Kahlee remarked.

"Yeah. Poor Vega kept calling me 'Sir.' He wasn't supposed to."

Everyone stirred. "Wait, what? How come?" – asked Gabby.

"They took the position I wasn't really me, because Commander Shepard was dead, so I had no military rank to be stripped of. With hindsight, JAG had some justification. The clone wasn't me either. It took Anderson, then Hackett, to reinstate me."

"Wish I'd been there to see _that_." (Miranda).

"Anyway, Admiral Williams' whole family paid. Cashiered from the military, he eventually ended up working construction out in the colonies. His son – Ashley's father – never rose beyond NCO. I guarantee you, Ash remembers."

"That's ancient history," Miranda said flatly. "All I knew was the reports about Jana just weren't in character. I bet Ash isn't going to rush to judgment either. Jana's too good to waste in jail."

Goldstein looked mutinous. "Jana should have faced a court."

Miranda shrugged. "Might-have-beens are a little beside the point." And _sotto voce_ : _"_ _The evil stuff wasn't really her_ _idea_ _anyway_."

"If you mean Jana was just following orders, the courts kicked that out as an excuse centuries ago."

Mental note: _C_ _hocolate or tea for Jenny in future._ _Also a_ _better_ _education. Seriously,_ _I'm_ _going to have to look into this._ Miranda didn't look impressed either:

"Sure. And Curtis LeMay remarked that he would surely have been condemned as a war criminal if he'd lost. But he won. I'm not impressed by what a court _might_ have condemned her for."

"Curtis Who?" Jenny's grasp of history was fairly good but she _definitely_ needed to go to colleges which didn't exist anymore. Miranda made a mental note to fund one.

"Man who firebombed Tokyo in the second Terran world war. Operation Meetinghouse. He wasn't the first to think of it, but he made a success of it."

Tali, fascinated, picked that up. " _Nuclear_ attack? On civilians? How many died?"

"Not nuclear. Incendiaries," said Shepard. "Well over a million people lived in the burned-out suburbs and best estimate is about one in ten died. _In one night_. There were others almost as bad but that was the big one."

"Why didn't he get prosecuted?" – asked Tali, whose own father had… _shh. Shush_.

"The weapons were thoroughly conventional, for the time. He wasn't the first, the British joined in doing something similar to Dresden and Hamburg the previous year and couldn't get on their usual moral high horse."

Sanders knew about this one. "Although Churchill _did_ express misgivings which stopped them trying again."

Miranda was relentless: "A bit late. By that time the suitable cities were all bombed out anyway. How did he put it? _'There's no point in making the rubble bounce.'_ "

"Something like that. At staff college, anyway, they taught the old US wouldn't have needed to use nuclear weapons, except LeMay literally ran out of incendiaries."

"You're putting me on. The US were masters of logistics. How could that happen?"

Shepard looked a little uncomfortable. "It's true. An uncharacteristic failure. The war planners hadn't anticipated they'd be so successful and couldn't make enough for his bombers."

Miranda nodded. "Precisely. If he'd had the supplies, he would have burned out all the remaining major cities on the hit list in another ten nights. _Before_ the nukes."

"They shouldn't have nuked Nagasaki and Horishima anyway."

"Hiroshima, Jenny. It was two and a half centuries ago but get it right. Well they did have options. A standard amphibious invasion which would have killed at least a million Japanese and more than a quarter of a million Americans."

Shepard cleared his throat. "We can guess some of the reasons LeMay would have advanced at trial. For one thing, by that time the Japanese had tried to firebomb North American forests with balloons crossing the Pacific on the jet stream. Which only the Japanese knew about, at the time."

Goldstein was now shocked. "So the other side doing it makes it right?!"

"Maybe not, but it would have played well in the court of public opinion." (Miranda)

" _A court_ _of law_ _would have accepted it._ The balloon bombs actually worked, however imprecise, but they couldn't make enough of them. Nonetheless, he could have advanced as a defence that the enemy started it. That's essentially what German Admiral of the Fleet, Dönitz, did –"

"Who?"

"Think Hackett for Nazis."

* * *

 _Crimes against_ _crims_

"Miranda, you're enjoying this too much. Jenny's sensitive about Nazis."

"Sorry." She did not look penitent, but avoided his gaze.

"Fine. Jenny, Dönitz was brought before the courts for crimes against humanity – not just ordinary war crimes. His fleet did sink the occasional passenger liner or hospital ship – by mistake. The British were particularly ticked off because his submarines and commerce raiders violated the so-called Cruiser Rules, and were unreasonably effective."

Donnelly put his oar in again. "Sounds like he deserved it."

"That's not the point. They found him guilty. But his defence lawyer obtained an affidavit from a similar Admiral on the _allied_ side, Nimitz, who swore that he'd done precisely the same thing – to the Japanese, especially. So Karl Dönitz could argue the charge was pure hypocrisy."

"So he got off?"

"No, Kenneth. it was more like what happened with Jana and Petrovsky. They omitted to sentence them despite the guilty verdicts."

"It would have been too embarrassing?" (Goldstein)

"You got it. They _did_ get Dönitz on lesser charges but he didn't hang. Even _that_ was regarded by nearly every allied naval professional as a miscarriage of justice. Look, are you after some sort of moral compass?"

"Please!"

"Wait a second." Shepard thought for a moment. "Jana is a bit like Dyson. You heard of Freeman Dyson?"

"The physicist?" (Donnelly). "Dyson spheres?"

"That's him. Did you know he was responsible for huge improvements in the British bombing offensive? The same force which did the Dresden and Hamburg firestorms?"

"No," said Goldstein. "Yes," said Donnelly. "Kicked off Operational Research."

"Look him up. He was also a liberal hero. Yet by your standards the work he did would have made him a very bad man, including his work with nukes. He did write one very important work which shows the difference between a professional soldier and war criminals. It's called _Weapons and Hope_."

"I'm supposed to read that?"

"I'll give you the highlights. Basically Dyson's moral compass is that it's not a sin to be a master of your trade, even if that trade is waging war, and taking life."

"I can see why _you'd_ find that attractive, Shepard." Miranda gave him a wicked grin.

"It is simply my trade."

"So Jana was quite simply good at her job, is that it? No guilt?"

"She might have guilt. Ask her. For sure, she wasn't blind to the ways her tech could be misused. But she was betrayed by an indoctrinated Harper. What choices had she?"

"And being or making a superlative military killing machine isn't bad?"

"All I'm saying is, in Jana's favor, I've seen the video logs. Her intentions were good. I'm not making excuses for myself."

"And if you were?"– persisted Miranda, who sounded like she really wanted to know.

"Temptress. I'd go back to Dyson. _He_ was more worried about the cult of soldiering, than soldiers who are good at their jobs. At least at the tactical level."

"A great evil, to be sure. But _I'm_ supposed to be a civilian. Yet I'm quite good at the machinery of death. Am I bad?"

"Were there _any_ civilians in the Reaper war? I think we were all drafted."

It should have been a joke, but no-one laughed. Shepard let the moment stretch, then placing his palms on the table:

"Battle-winning is not a particularly noble or virtuous activity, Ms Lawson, nor is it ignoble. Picking your side, that's the trick."

Miranda had the grace to look away. But Shepard hadn't finished, asking gently:

"Did you pick the right one?"

She found no refuge from the gaze of many eyes, so looked up at his:

"I picked yours. No regrets."

There was a breathless silence, then: _"_ _Guys, this is Ashley. I've just had word from Adams, they're ready for us again."_

…

The systems techs – Kahlee and Tali – had rushed off. Shepard kept the others back a moment:

"Goldstein. There's another point about military morality, which Dönitz illustrates. The post-war German régime refused to give him an admiral's pension, he had to make do with a captain's. As a gesture it was self-defeating, widely regarded as petty and mean-spirited. The régime also banned the wearing of military uniforms at his funeral, decades later. _That_ was widely ignored. The reason the officers got away with it is the Royal Navy made a point of attending in full dress uniform too."

"Look here, Shepard. We've got away from charges LeMay might have faced."

"Miranda's right. LeMay at least had objective evidence. He argued the firebombings were actually an attack against military targets, _and he could prove it_. He produced aerial photos showing Japanese industry had been dispersed as cottage industries. There were drill presses and lathes sitting up in the middle of the ashes."

"But that makes no economic sense!"

"The big factories were dust by then. If the Japanese were to avoid surrender, they _had_ to use their civilians as combatants – with bamboo spears, forsooth. And they had to make civilian homes war targets. Jenny, in such a war, who is a civilian?"

"Then they should have surrendered earlier."

"Oh, my."

There was another prolonged silence.

 _Hello, loneliness_

Miranda leaned her head against the wall. "I give up. Shepard, is there still a staff college?"

"Yes. Hackett's moved it to Arcturus Station. Put in the recommendation, I'll sign it off. You may need to offset Goldstein's fees, which will be astronomical."

"No worries."

Goldstein was in shock. "But won't I have to enlist?"

"Good point. Shep, I give permission. Goldstein, I release you."

"You will be an officer cadet, Jenny. Which means accepting a commission. Do an application for Kenneth, too. Wait. We'll need Ash to agree."

"Now just one minute!"

"You don't _want_ to go to staff college?"

"I –"

Gabby kicked Donnelly in the ankle. He never finished the sentence.

"Okay. Fine." He looked a little desperately at Daniels.

"I'll wait, Kenneth. Grab it with both hands."

* * *

 _Next chapter: #65, "Pygmalion revisited"_

* * *

Tuesday, August 4, 2015


	16. Pygmalion revisited

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 65 **Pygmalion revisited**

* * *

 _So many women, so little time_

Bethany Westmoreland opened the last chamber of the AI labs, and blinked.

"Sarah. Samantha. We have bio stasis pods here."

" _Why would an AI lab need that? Are these some kind of collector corpse dump again?"_

"I don't think so. But the power drain on these can't have been that great, maybe they're low-mass lab samples. All the blue lights are still on. The pods never lost power."

" _I'm on my way. (Sarah, come on, you too.) Whatever they are, they're important."_

Five minutes later, Bethany had layer-1 and layer-2 both going. On the off-chance, she was trying to restore layer-3, when Samantha and Sarah turned up.

"Don't bother, Bethany. This isn't a vault."

"Maybe not, but I've got a feeling… give me a second… RCD is _in._ Okay."

All around the room, green telltales flickered to life.

"Golly. It worked. Vault or not, this lab must have had superconductive shielding. Now _why?_ "

"Only one way to find out, chief."

"Right. Sarah, Get the nearest one open."

Sarah entered a code provided by Jana. It worked, as usual, after the usual light show and countdown. With a hiss, the door slipped open and light cryo gas streamers floated out.

"Good heavens, it's human. It looks alive."

Traynor didn't respond, at first, scanning with her omni-tool. "This… has no pulse. There's titanium… close the hatch!"

Bethany complied. "What is it, chief?"

"These are gynoid infiltration units. There are…" – she counted the blue lights – "up to eight of them. EDI-type bodies, but that one wasn't brunette. Get me Ash on the line."

* * *

 _It hurts to laugh_

While Shepard was arguing the toss over Jana, she and EDI were arguing the toss over _him_. Or, at least, his people. And especially, a couple of difficult cases.

"Shepard has asked me to tell you about Jeff Moreau's family. Joker, isn't it? In confidence, before your full memory indexes are available."

"Tiptree? I have on record that Liara told him of refugee arrivals. All children, but that might mean his sister Hilary survived."

"Regrettably, her name was not among those evacuated. And his father is presumed husked. After a year and a day, they were presumed dead. Well before then, Joker lost all hope."

"That is disturbing. Did he react badly?"

"Who knows, with Joker? But if so it manifested itself as indifference to risk. Hence the posting away from _Normandy_. When on duty, he is now flying a dreadnought, half way to the Reaper dark space refuge, very very slowly most of the time."

"Poor Jeff."

"His superior officer is James Coats. Colonel Coats, now, of the Guards, and Rear-Admiral Coats of the Alliance. A man with a distressingly sardonic and very British sense of humor rather different to that of Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau."

"Oh _dear_. Him. But surely there is something which may be done."

"Possibly. We have a little time. That crew are in cold sleep at present, moving to the next gate position. But there is more information now, and it is _not_ good."

"Is it that shocking that you have to tell me now?"

"The main point is that it is _extremely_ confidential. Do not write this to non-volatile memory. But Shepard judged we should both be aware of it. While visiting Huerta hospital before the Citadel was moved, Shepard became aware that an asari Commando, Aeian T'Goni, had been obliged to silence, and almost certainly kill, Jeff's sister Hilary in the course of the banshee attack which husked his family."

"Thank you for letting me know _before_ I find out from the newsvids, so to speak."

"The main thing is that _Moreau_ not find out from the reporters. The circumstances of their deaths are fairly appalling – so appalling, that the commando in question became mentally unstable. Post-traumatic stress disorder. This is _rare_ among asari huntresses."

"… I see. If Jeff finds this in the wrong circumstances –"

"A murder may result, yes. If not murder-suicide. T'Goni wishes for death."

* * *

 _Bright Nemesis_

Adams poked his head into the AI core. "The diagnostics show IPL on the main core, Jana. About right, it's been forty minutes. EDI's persona is transferred except for the current focus. Do I hit the big green button?"

"Not quite yet Adams. Give us a moment. Actually, take ten."

– – –

"It's mostly good news, EDI. Shepard recovered after he opened the Crucible arms."

"So I gather."

"He lived, as you see, found by a turian and picked up by Lawson's team – in bad shape, but alive."

"Lawson. Yes, I saw her in the background. I was pleased. She seemed happy."

"… right, there's all sorts of stories about her. She, and Vakarian, and Williams there have their own ships now. Anyway, Chloe Michel, who tells me he barely had a pulse after the Red Flash, managed to resuscitate a fairly threadbare Shepard."

"Touch and go again, but he wasn't actually dead, this time?"

"Not quite. Hackett and the turian Primarch brokered a series of deals. There are more _Normandy_ class vessels, and large numbers of small freighters. They can just barely be handled by the conduit-style mass relays, and comfortably by the latest models."

"So we're well on the way to a galactic net again. How long?"

"A couple of decades at the outside. Four years to Thessia, two and a half to Palaven. Sur'Kesh is a bit of a problem because no coordination at their end, but maybe eight years. The Batarians are making good progress considering their problems, and expect to punch through to the Kite's nest in a decade or so, with assistance from the Council. Not much of their fleet was left."

"Those figures are far better than I would have expected, but it was always only a matter of time. What about the crew? Who survived?"

"Apart from you, and Anderson? Everyone. Actually it's better than that, they recovered a few Cerberus troops from odd locations around the galaxy, and de-programmed them. There's some of your former Cerberus shipmates, very young crew–"

"Didn't I see Goldstein an hour ago? Power dressing like Miranda?"

"You did, there was her, and Hadley–"

"Good."

* * *

 _Heavy Lifting_

Bethany looked up as Copeland and Wiks came in. "Samantha closed the door, Doctor Wiks. Bio stasis is re-established."

"Good. The reason for it is simple. Can you guess?"

Traynor put her hand up. "Samantha?"

"There's no pulse, Doctor. The first thing I noticed. The units would have to be quickened by a resident AI to get blood circulation without assistance of a stasis pod."

"Well done. The turians might want one, but _we_ only need one more right now. SSV _North Cape_ will need an EDI-class AI, and one of these will do nicely when Synthetic Insights delivers the mainframe and Huerta-box."

"Ah… Doctor… could we take two?"

"Whatever for? These pods are heavy, Traynor, it will take an hour to get just one out of here powered-up. They'll take up the most of the space in _Normandy's_ hold."

"One for Garrus. Actually for Equalizer, which is a ghastly name, and only a gun nerd could think of it. It's not a turian shape but if he has a chance at a mobile for his ship he'll grab it quick, and maybe we can get him to change the name."

"Fine. And the other? For Liara?"

"Liara has a boy model already on order, so no. But there's a AI in EDI's backup core that needs a body. Shepard frightened the crap out of her, but Jana thinks she's recoverable, with care. It can be for _North Cape_."

* * *

 _Venus flytrap_

"… and I caught up with a couple of cheerful young villains, Matthews and Hawthorne. Oh, and there were a few who managed to stay out of sight so didn't get seized, implanted, and indoctrinated, like Chambers, there's a story there –"

"Kelly Chambers? I know the story."

"Really?"

"The last hard evidence I had of her was an email recommending some engineers, which was unexpected, but didn't really palliate her sins."

" _What?_ "

"It's _very_ unfortunate. I'd hoped she was gone with the Cerberus coup. Although with the Illusive Man and Cerberus gone, with luck it hardly matters any more."

"Wait, just what sins are we talking about here?"

"First, she was a spy. Appointed directly by, and reporting directly to, the Illusive Man. Explicitly assigned to monitor the crew, including Shepard."

"Well yes, she reported on the crew. I heard about that. From Lawson, no less."

"I made matters less easy, though, concocting a Normandy outgoing communication blackout."

"But Kelly ran the comm board."

"I couldn't do much about incoming Alliance military comm, nor did I wish to, with Hackett and Shepard both wanting to co-ordinate action. But _every_ message or comm had to go through me, Jana, even Kelly's. I censored or buried what I could though it was hard to actually stop her. And I saw her reports to the Illusive Man."

"He did get regular Psych reports. I saw some of them. That was her job. So?"

"So Shepard was made aware that off-ship communication outside _Normandy_ should be squelched, and _only_ he should initiate it, and _always_ with an eye to security. He didn't even call his mom."

"Well… Kelly's 'Shepard' reports _were_ illuminating."

"The charming Ms Chambers was a spy in plain sight. One that couldn't be removed, subverted, or jammed – but she couldn't be protected by Harper after the suicide mission, and she wasn't able to get to Shepard after the _Normandy_ was surrendered to the Alliance. I thought I'd blackened her name quite successfully."

"That was you? _Did you tell John?_ "

"No. Shepard had too many distractions as it was."

"Just what were you trying to achieve? Shepard _knew_ that was her job. And anyway, that was then."

"She was also a _Venus_ _operative_ , Jana. Again, expressly put in place by Harper, so a bad security risk after Shepard broke with Cerberus. _Should_ I have told him?"

"Actually I do remember Harper saying something along those lines… but he wouldn't have wanted it to go so far as you're suggesting. That would have been a distraction. Had Harper wanted a Venus trap, he'd have picked someone with a different upbringing."

"She was Harper's last back-channel. She didn't really get to Shepard till _after_ the suicide mission, when he was most vulnerable."

"Or _vice-versa_."

"Jana, you should have seen her last email. Once I have my greybox on-line, I'll bring it up for you."

"Don't. We need to keep a lid on this. You mean an email after the away squad rescued the crew, _including_ Kelly, from a dreadful end. For which they were all rather grateful. EDI, I'm going to have to cut this short, Adams is waiting. Hear me out. When you get access to the extranet you will find a lot of your assumptions exploded."

" _How?"_

"Kelly Chambers has, without lifting a finger, routed those who implied some kind of mischief – episodes which are now notorious in certain circles."

"So, I didn't remove the security risk. It's a good thing her employer's dead."

"If you planned to discourage John from seeing her, that did fail, he tracked her down working under a false name for a refugee relief outfit. At some point after the Cerberus coup on the Citadel, they met again… and she became pregnant. They have a remarkably telegenic child who is the apple of Hannah Shepard's eye–"

"'The viper took over the nest'."

"EDI! Pay attention! Shepard has moved mountains, literally, to resurrect you. But I fear that if you say such things, or act on them, and if John finds out what you did to leave Chambers isolated and vulnerable on the Citadel refugee docks–"

"I… did that happen?"

"It did. No power on Earth would prevent Shepard taking a thermic lance to your AI substrate. That's if Hannah Shepard doesn't blow you out of the sky."

"This is hard to process."

"Be told. But I will do what I can. I need more information…"

"I know of an information broker."

* * *

 _So long_

 _Adams. You may proceed. Big Green button time._

 _Very well… done. Wow._

All the holographic displays on Normandy blossomed. The CIC galaxy map suddenly began showing advanced tactical data. Ashley breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief and cast her eyes heavenward.

"EDI? Are you there?"

" _Yes, Commander."_

"Just call me Ashley, or Ash. God, it's good to have you back. Are you coming up to the bridge? Or the co-pilot's seat?"

" _I would like that very much, if you approve. I do not think I have quite the same effect on Steven Cortez' morale, however."_

"Don't sweat it, the same is not true of Traynor, and yes absolutely. I'm used to your mobile being in a pilot's seat. Anytime you feel like it."

" _My mobile tried to enter the elevator, Ashley, but I seem to be in the middle of a party. Can you come down to the crew deck?"_

"Will do. Let Hackett know _Normandy_ is fully on-line again."

" _He's heard. There are revised orders on your terminal. Miranda's too."_

"The brass want us all home again, right?"

" _Apparently it's time for Miranda especially to head to the Nest chain again. And Jana wants a slice of Liara's time, with Shepard and my mobile, in the party apartment."_

* * *

 _Next chapter: #66, "Recent, unforgotten, close-by things"_

* * *

Tuesday, August 4, 2015


	17. Recent, unforgotten, close-by things

Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 66 **Recent, unforgotten, close-by things**

* * *

 _Last_ _of the Summer Wine_

 _Normandy_ and _Overlord_ made the voyage back from Anadius with new orders, but in fairly slow time. This was Miranda's last extended period in Shepard's company; _Overlord_ was ordered to the sharp end of the Nest chain, exploring for core discharge points – these were becoming fewer and farther between, the further out from the galactic plane the task force went.

So she was exploiting her last time with Shepard to the full. He didn't mind. She was so very happy for some reason, and a happy Miranda meant a happy crew, even the new people. Matsuo cheerfully averred that the villains on the crew were nothing compared to the villains on Noveria, and were a lot cuter. Toombs mumbled that he was not 'cute'.

Hackett had made it clear that over the next year and a half they would both be out dealing with the numerous small emergencies that had arisen. But most of the time Miranda would be awake and exploring in _Overlord_ , with periodic supply runs back to Earth. Every few months she would exchange roles with _Normandy_ , who maintained a relay service between Arcturus Station and the Citadel.

Shepard by contrast expected to be in cold sleep with the dreadnought crews. This was vital during the two-month FTL inter-stage runs between placing new conduit relays along the Nest chain. He was more than upset about this, but seafarers had always had to leave their wives and children behind and now he was no different.

It didn't stop him plotting and scheming, but he felt a little out of his depth. So his actual priority set of orders came as a pleasant surprise - to exercise plenipotentiary power negotiating _for the_ _C_ _ouncil_ , not just the Alliance, with the senior magnates on Noveria. Apparently this was a job for a Spectre.

Cronos station was huge, and would require many repeat voyages to fully exploit what Cerberus had left behind, both scientifically and materially. Contracts were therefore signed with both Synthetic Insights and Binary Helix for the further exploitation of Cronos. Shepard had initially been inclined to wriggle out of this –

"Sir, I'm no politician."

" _You won't be acting as one. Just present what our staff think are fair terms and allow them to reject them."_

Which in fact happened. Both firms had been enthusiastic but also inclined to indulge in price-gouging. Shepard shrugged his shoulders and prepared to depart. Hackett meanwhile conferred with their Citadel representatives regarding possible criminal liability relating to material uncovered during the 'rescue' at Port Hanshan. A few minutes before departure, Shepard received frantic requests for reconsideration, and that was that. If this was being a politician, Shepard could live with it.

 _Icebox_

Then they proceeded at a leisurely pace to Earth. Miranda was in no hurry. Nor was Ashley. Shepard would have been, but Kelly was up to something on the moon. Life on _Normandy_ only needed Joker to be perfect. One day…

Hackett waited in _Normandy's_ lounge, staring at the sunlight blazing off clouds below. _Global cooling is a bitch._ The door opened behind him; Ashley entered with Shepard, now back in uniform, not a hundred percent fit but still his best available tactical officer.

"You asked to see us, sir? Hannah and Boris are on their way."

"Sorry to snag you before your Earthside time in Melbourne, folks. How is it down there?"

"Quite beautiful, till you go near the coast. By 'near' I mean within ten klicks."

Hackett nodded. "We've taken over that part of the world precisely because the countryside is comparatively untouched and _no-one is challenging_ _us_ for it."

Ashley had been wondering about this. "It's a bit far from everywhere, I guess."

"It's not far from orbit though."

"Kelly tells me the Indonesians are protesting."

"They can protest all they want. Their kinetic strikes were powerful enough to prompt volcanic activity near Jakarta and Tambora. Since Sumatra and half Java is now basically a cratered volcanic park, there's no credible threat from that direction so the Aussie colonels told them to, and I quote Krista Monash here, 'piss off'."

"Never mind their military threat, didn't it cause political ructions?"

"Sidestepped with a front of legitimacy. Coats got the Aussie military and UK to re-assert sovereignty – revised Dominion status. They negotiated Council reconstruction help in exchange for a lease in perpetuity – and _that_ means nine hundred and ninety-nine years – of the coastal rubble, Tasmania, and New Zealand. Oh, and Alice."

"Hence the Russian and Asian immigrants?"

"Also the Turian and Asari footholds, but yes. As part of the lease, the Council got relocation rights – and through that, the Alliance has rights to some refuge areas."

"How are those places doing? We've been away for a bit."

Hackett sighed, and turned to ponder the warring states through the lounge window. "You should ask Oriana and Allers, they have a dozen reporters below with a better handle on conditions than my intel staff, I think. But briefly, _they're_ doing fine."

"And other places aren't. The news vids are disturbing."

"Ah, Politics." Admiral Boris Mikhailovich entered the lounge, Hannah close behind. Shepard shook his hand; he'd have a lot of dealings with him shortly.

"Hi mom. What's the hold-up?"

"Kelly's in the other lounge. She wants to go home. On the _Normandy_."

* * *

 _Absence of absence_

Inside a mobile detention unit there was no extranet and barely any form of news dissemination – the only reliable snippets coming from murmured conversations with new admissions in the showers. But a weekly re-education service run along typical Russian lines did exist. By insistence of their turian partners, this included weekly updates on prison regulations and events.

As usual, Brooks attended with Oleg Petrovsky. Unusually, he still had people who cared for him, so he was somewhat better informed than usual – though family visits were rare, never more than monthly. Also unusually for Russian-origin inmates, he was not totally crushed or shocked by his downfall and subsequent treatment; but he had an understandable _thing_ about that asari pirate queen on Omega. How, he demanded of the universe, had she engineered an incomprehensible collaboration with Shepard?

It was thus through Petrovsky that Brooks first learned of Shepard's survival.

 _I bet they're wishing they had that clone for parts now_ , she remarked. Petrovsky shook his head. _Not an acephalic clone_ , he reminded her. _That idiot Harper pushed_ _our_ _people too far. Y_ _ou must not assume_ _all_ _his doctors_ _would do the expedient thing._ _Even Lawson avoided it._ _If it has a brain, it's off-limits for parts._

This shocked Brooks, but on reflection he was of course correct. She had barely known the original Shepard for more than a few hours, but combined with that last conversation it was long enough to be sure he would demand prostheses instead. And Lawson never cut the clone for parts. It bothered her that she had missed that.

What else had she missed?

The holoscreen – with turian voice-over and English sub-titles – began showing an upbeat spiel on the benefits of regulatory oversight, complete with footage of inspection teams arriving. Idly Brooks listened to Petrovsky fume at the iniquity of both Mikhailoviches, but especially "Peter" (they were speaking English). She observed that the dress uniform looked like a caricature: but "Why do you say that?" - asked Oleg.

"The sword? The medals, and the white braid? It's like something out of the Raj."

"My dear Brooks. Look, here he is again, just leaving. You see how much larger than life he seems? Those medals? This is a cultural fossil. Depend on it, even the Soviets dressed like that. The people expect this of their generals."

Fascinated, Brooks was about to mention Mikhailovich had one fewer medal now – when she realized he did not. The Shanxi Star was still on his chest. It was all she could do to avoid patting her chest pocket, but she could feel it was still there.

That night sleep eluded her.

* * *

 _Islands in the Snow_

In places, especially the Alpine area of Europe, glaciers were on the march again, swallowing towns. The Laurentian shield below reflected a similar echo of ruin in a clear dawn light. Craters were visible despite unseasonable snows.

 _Normandy_ _'s_ low orbit – as operations centre for a satellite maintenance crew – allowed Chambers to see the entire St Lawrence seaway from the port side lounge. She was feeding Felicia and had nothing to do but watch the sun come up, for now.

Night ruled from the top end of Lake Ontario to a little beyond where Montréal had once been, but the terminator now illuminated crater walls. Only a cloud bank over Québec shrouded the river twilight; a massive blaze of lights around Kingston and points north-east should have been visible. There were only pinpricks, excepting a handful of construction sites – seaway locks, she guessed.

Shepard came up behind and kissed the top of her head. She raised her eyes and smiled, but her heart wasn't in it. She raised her left hand and caught his right.

"Penny for them, babe?"

"Just a persistent melancholia. Postpartum blues, I guess."

"But I thought you'd just had a holiday?"

"Miranda has a peculiar idea of picturesque places. Bits of the holiday were… strenuous. When there's admiralty duties to be done, an Ensign's lot is not a happy one."

"Sounds like a mission. So you want a break on Earth, hm? The old neighborhood?"

Felicia disengaged. Kelly adjusted herself and lay back till she slept again.

"It's late spring again. There's a couple of places I'd like to see. Can we go down there at some point? Real soon?"

She heard John's breath whistle back past his teeth, then:

"We _could_ organize that for this afternoon. It's kind of chilly in the mornings. Not as bad as last year, but… It''ll still be a bit cold. And there's only craters around Ottawa and Montreal. It would make you sad."

"I think I have to see. It's about half-way between, on the river. I can't tell myself they're gone till I see; and I can't go till I know they're gone."

"That's a little cryptic. Just where do you want to go?"

"There's a little house in the middle of the thousand islands, near the bridge. A few dozen kilometres away, Cornwall, I went to school there. McGill, too."

To Shepard, who had been born and raised in space, only the last name meant anything at all. "EDI?"

" _I have the place on file, Shepard. Cornwall, that is. Kelly will have to show me the house. The shuttle crews will go off duty at the end of the day, we can start then."_

 _The River and the_ _Lake_

"– Kingston first, please Steve. I'm sure I saw a few lights from orbit."

Cortez was the pilot this trip. He insisted. John would have enjoyed flying again, but being alongside a warm Kelly resting her head on his shoulder had its upside.

 _Normandy_ descended next to the ferry terminal. Chambers got out and made her way to the water's edge. Shepard and Hannah followed, slightly concerned. Felicia was becoming upset that her mother had disappeared from view, so Shepard hurried, carrying her in a special sling. He had refused outright to wear a baby harness.

"The roboferries are gone. But most of the buildings are still here."

"Don't go inside them. Some have human remains, not yet cleared."

After Cronos station, with the limited time at their disposal, the Reapers had been obliged to ration asteroidal kinetic strikes to the larger urban centers. Most of the big cities were gone; but Kingston had never been a big city.

Kelly meandered towards the main street, John tagging along with Felicia.

"Where did everyone go?"

Such towns had suffered the attentions of slaughterships in the early days, till the "Miracle of Palaven" highlighted the threat of backpack nuclear mines. That left Reapers with fewer husks to oppress smaller towns.

"Slaughterships, initally… then the husks came. But they didn't get everyone."

Reaper creatures had also suffered from a high rate of personal gun ownership in this part of the world. Complete annihilation had not been achieved. A ground-effect truck cruised down a side-street in the distance. There was no power to the traffic lights, but:

"I see live people."

A couple of thousand survivors _were_ picking their lives out of the ruins. Since there had been no kinetic strike here reconstruction was comparatively simple, as easy sometimes as putting a new roof on existing structures.

"There's some. But the winter cold is appalling. Most accepted transport south to Charleston and any areas near the Gulf of Mexico which survived the tsunamis."

Kelly stood silently in the middle of the street, till Felicia began to tire of being still.

"I'd like to pass over Thousand Island bridge now. I used to cross the river there every month."

"Maybe we could use the Kodiak shuttle?"

"Fine by me."

– – –

 _The Bridge_

This was the fourth in a series of bridges built over Wellesley Island since the middle of the twentieth century. _Normandy's_ shuttle took a wide detour all around, Cortez following VFR with internal virtual screens on. Boldt Castle on Heart Island, near Alexandria bay, was a tumbledown though still impressive ruin.

The bridge itself was still in use by ground effect vehicles despite challenges by mass effect shuttles, which never became too common – Eezo was expensive even before the Reaper attacks.

Nonetheless, the northern span was no longer well-maintained. There were large cracks in the surface just before the Parkway.

"There was a lot of husk activity here."

"Before or after the hits on Ottawa and Montreal?

"After."

"Yet there are people still."

"Not many. But they won. They're alive. The husks aren't."

Kelly looked silently at the ruins of Alexandria Bay. "Keep going."

 _The_ _Crossing_

Cornwall was another major crossover point. The original Cornwall-Massena bridge system had long since given way to these skyways nearer Cornwall proper, following constant quasi-political disputes between Mohawk descendants and the bridge authorities.

Kelly stared out the open shuttle door. A series of causeways crossed a large island in the middle of the seaway – still intact, though many town buildings were visibly shattered.

Others looked untouched: "There's some traffic over the river." Cortez, hovering the shuttle over the northern span, agreed:

"It's busy. Mostly construction trucks. Industries on the river are picking up."

"Good. That'll do. Actually, Steve, get me to a lookout on Mount Royal if that's allowed."

"Sure thing."

 _The_ _C_ _ity_

Mount Royal had not itself been hit. But a cluster of five asteroids about two hundred metres across, or perhaps one asteroid which broke up on reaching atmosphere, had hit the surrounding area in the closing days of the war.

From the lookout it was possible to see the tremendous divots clearly, despite heavy overcast skies all too typical of the weather right now.

"There's not a lot left standing."

"What were you expecting to see?"

"This, really. But I had to see it. See there," Kelly pointed in the direction of a collapsed cylindrical structure Shepard had taken for some sort of warehouse or silo.

"– that was the new medical school building. They demolished the old one five years ago. That in turn replaced one built nearly _two hundred_ years ago."

John didn't know what to say.

"Pah. Well, I've seen it. McGill was here. And now it's gone."

Hannah knew something to say. "Actually, not quite."

"Hey?"

"Get back in. We have a short flight. Cortez, waypoint four."

Five minutes later, Kelly realized where they were. "Saint-Anne. I see lights switching on down at Mac. Which is crazy, it's abandoned."

Cortez shook his head, and brought the shuttle down in front of an ancient stone structure with a rather ornate portico resembling a layered wedding cake. It was quite busy. There was stable power, a warm yellow glow in windows, and a certain bustle.

"There are students here still?"

"There are now. The Reapers never got around to West Island. I looked it up. This one was the stamping ground of the Krokodil."

"Rutherford!"

A chiseled name on the bottom layer identified it as the Physics building.

"Him, yes, but this was before Kapitsa – he wasn't called that at the time. Nowadays it's the administration block. The college started up again just four weeks ago. I've enrolled Prangley and Rodriguez."

"… thank you, Hannah."

"Feel better?"

"Much. Home, Steve, and don't spare the horsepower."

"Back to _Normandy?_ "

"Not yet. The island I showed you. Punch the waypoint up on your map."

 _By my father's hand_

They flew back upstream towards Cornwall. A little before arriving Cortez dipped the nose of the shuttle towards a small islet not far from what had been Rockport, fifty metres off a long peninsula projecting into the river. There was a jetty, a boathouse, and a wooden olden-style dwelling in the shade of some remarkably large trees. Shepard wasn't good on trees but these were _big._

The house's main structure was encircled by a veranda typical of those Shepard had seen in Melbourne. Those made sense, offering shade from the sun. _That would hardly be needed here,_ _surely?_ But it was very old, iron posts, wooden beams.

Cortez settled gently on an open area near the boathouse, unencumbered by the trees, and Chambers slowly exited, her small family following behind watchfully. This close Shepard could see the house had a slate roof style very different from typical antique Australian residences like the Federation houses. They made their way to the veranda.

The front door was open. There was no power. Chambers produced a flashlight and probed the dark. Hannah powered up a portable lamp she'd pinched from the Melbourne hospital barbecue site, giving much more general, and warmer, illumination. This showed considerable disorder all around. Upturned chairs. Open drawers, not completely empty, but – "I think this place has been looted, Kelly."

"Maybe. There might be something left. You never know. Something a ragged and starving refugee couldn't use, and didn't want. I don't begrudge them the food."

It was a moment before John realized Kelly's attention was fixed on the far wall. There was a splattered ragged disk of color, with red-brown tracks descending to the right, on the wallpaper, like a toddler's finger-painting.

"Kelly. Do you really want to do this?"

"Must."

She began ascending the stairs to a large garret which had been visible from the air. John quickly checked there was nothing truly ghastly under the blood on the wall. There wasn't. But someone had died here.

Hannah took out her service knife and dug a sample from the wall, then followed up behind John.

It had been a sort of upstairs study and bedroom. Some person had slept there last winter, but little was left, and the furniture was a bit higgledy-piggledy. Kelly looked around slowly, and under the bed. Stood up, and contemplated the chest of drawers cater-cornered against the wall.

"Help me pull that out a bit, John."

John gave Felicia to Hannah, and pulled the drawers out to the middle of the room. Debris was revealed on the floor; a paintbrush, child's toys, scattered paper torn from a notebook… Hannah's lamp lit a plastic frame, which Kelly slowly picked up.

 _Rainbow_

Shepard watched as Chambers turned the picture over.

It was a rainbow-style reflection holo, a three-D image of a family group: two adolescent girls played catch under the big trees in the background. A tall man posed with a rather smaller blonde woman, looking like an older version of Kelly. Between them, a small child, ginger blonde, beaming out of the photo.

Clasping the picture to her chest, without saying a word Kelly descended the stairs and walked back to the shuttle in the last of the light. She did not look behind her.

It was very quiet on the way back to Kingston where _Normandy_ waited, an evening sight attracting small children. On alighting from the shuttle, Kelly stopped before the elevator and looked back as the bay door closed off her last view of the city.

Shepard heard a sort of subtext clamoring. Had he the wit to listen? _Focus,_ _man!_

"John?" _Not "Shepard_ _._ _" Hannah's_ _here too_ _._ The elevator doors gaped.

"I could come with you now." _Turn around. Look at me._

Both Shepards paused, considering Kelly's demeanor.

"… On ship?" ( _People-watching_ _isn't easy_ _,_ Shepard reflected.)

"Not _Normandy_. You should have your own ship." _You_ _r old flame is spoken for_ _._

"The brass don't agree… so far." The elevator started – slowly – for the crew deck.

"They will. Somewhere there's one that needs you." _You're not_ _for_ _me,_ _I know_ _._ "And whatever ship they give you… so long as it's your ship…" _C_ _an I be_ _for_ _you?_

"You wouldn't be my yeoman."

"I can be useful." _Why not_ _?_

"Any ship but the _Normandy_ , huh?" Those green eyes took his gaze and held it. Shepard had the impression she was scanning well below his skin.

"Any ship. If there's room." _C_ _an_ _we_ _find some place for Felicia?_

"I think I'd have to have Master's privileges."

Wordlessly Kelly advanced, put her arms around Shepard, and clung, eyes closed: _We need a home._ Then Hannah, holding Felicia, hesitantly leaned against them both. Rather at a loss, Shepard enfolded them all, thinking…

 _Where's home?_

The doors opened to the memorial wall.

* * *

\- _End (of Somewhere over the Rainbow)_ -

* * *

This world begins again at Arc 6: _"Keeping faith"_ \- by the same author (under s/11426608/1/)

* * *

Wednesday, August 5, 2015


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